CANSO Global safety achievement award 2021 shortlist announced

CANSO has announced the shortlisted candidates for the CANSO Global Safety Achievement Award 2021.

The award recognises those individuals, teams, or companies that have made a significant contribution to aviation safety in the past 12 months.

Four nominations have been shortlisted this year from To70, ENAIRE, and two from NAV CANADA. The winner will be announced at the World ATM Congress in Madrid, Spain, in June.

Osman Saafan, DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH Director of Corporate Safety & Security / CSO and Civil-Military Affairs, and Chair of the CANSO Safety Standing Committee, said: "Our industry is seeing a rapid return to pre-COVID-19 levels of flying around the world. In fact, in some areas, we are now even exceeding pre-pandemic levels.

"As flying returns quickly, it is more vital than ever that Air Traffic Management remains relentlessly focussed on safety, and the quality of the nominations received for this year's CANSO Global Safety Achievement Awards demonstrates that focus, resolve, creativity and technical expertise remains firmly in place, if not stronger than ever before."

The nominees are:

• Huw Ross, To70 – Huw Ross, with support from To70, launched a free digital Safety Management System (SMS) to provide a useful reference to ANSPs seeking to improve their safety culture, refine their safety practices or reach new levels of safety management maturity within their organisation. The goal was simple: provide guidance that is simple to understand and makes safety accessible to everyone including accountable managers, corporate function staff, frontline operational and support staff, and of course safety professionals. To date the site has made a difference to over 800 people in 89 countries.
• Christian Verdonk & Jesús Romero, ENAIRE Safety Unit –for theAutomatic Safety Monitoring Tool (ASMT). The tool provides candidate events which may be considered infringements. These candidates are often non-genuine and subject to a costly filtering process, crucial for accurately reporting on safety performance indicators. ENAIRE and CRIDA deployed a highly accurate Machine Learning pipeline which automatically filters non-genuine events within PERSEO, a multipurpose tool developed by CRIDA. The false positive rate decreased to less than four percent, significantly boosting the trust in the tool and facilitating the decision-making processes in ENAIRE.

• Noel Dwyer, NAV CANADA – Advances in the technology deployed by NAV CANADA and NATS to track aircraft location, speed and altitude made 2020 one of the safest years on record to fly over the North Atlantic Ocean. Recent analysis in 2021 of Gander oceanic control area (OCA) safety data from NAV CANADA shows that with the use of space-based automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast (ADS-B), in addition to other air traffic management infrastructure, an unprecedented safety accomplishment was realised in 2020: no aircraft spent any time at an unprotected flight level or on an unprotected track.

• Chris Bowden, NAV CANADA – The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has identified that unstable approaches, including circling, contribute to runway excursions incidents and accidents. NAV CANADA conducted an evaluation of the Circling Minima for Instrument Approach Procedures to determine where procedures could be removed without jeopardising safe accessibility. Following an assessment, relevant circling procedures were removed at aerodromes adequately supported by straight-in RNAV approaches resulting in the revocation of over 1,200 circling procedures with an overall safety improvement for the aviation community.