EASA publishes Annual Safety Review 2024
13.07.2024 - 00:19
/ traveldailynews.com
/ Vicky Karantzavelou
The 2024 EASA Annual Safety Review highlights Europe’s aviation safety, noting a 95% traffic recovery to pre-COVID levels and only two fatal accidents in 2023. This report supports ongoing safety enhancements through the European Plan for Aviation Safety.
The 2024 Annual Safety Review (ASR) of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is now online. The 2024 Edition looks at the safety performance of the European aviation system in 2023. This, and other analyses carried out by EASA in collaboration with national aviation authorities (NAAs) and industry, is used to support the safety risk management (SRM) process that drives the decision-making reflected in the European Plan for Aviation Safety (EPAS). Therefore, where risks are identified, further analysis is performed and when needed, mitigation actions are included in the EPAS.
This year, there is a new chapter specifically looking at unmanned aircraft system (UAS) / drone safety performance.
In 2023, traffic reached 95 % of 2019, pre-COVID levels. A total of 2.3 billion passengers were welcomed by Europe’s airports in 2023. Passenger traffic across the European airport network increased by 19 % compared with the previous year.
At a global level, over recent years, there have been around 10 fatal accidents annually (between 2020-2022); in 2023 this dropped to two fatal accidents. From these two accidents, there were 77 fatalities, marking a decrease compared to 2022. It is the second-lowest fatality count in the decade, close to the record-lowest number set in 2017 (66 fatalities).
In 2023, there were 7.3 million safe flights in Europe with no fatal accidents, involving a European operator both for complex and non-complex aeroplanes. While this is clearly positive news, this result was only achieved by the entire industry focusing on safety as a priority. There is no room for complacency in aviation safety.
EASA says the geopolitical landscape continues to impact aviation safety significantly, leading to reduced airspace availability and particularly the manipulation of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals through jamming and spoofing. The Tokyo Haneda Airport runway collision that occurred in January confirmed the importance of further actions to improve runway safety.
In 2023, there were 7.3 million safe flights in Europe with no fatal accidents involving a European operator both for complex and non-complex aeroplanes. Further, there were 94 accident and serious-incident occurrences in 2023, coded with the ‘system component failure’ occurrence category for complex CAT aeroplanes.
For specialised operations (SPO), 2023 was the year of the lowest number of accidents since 2013 — 11 in total. The majority of SPO accidents and