ICAO Annex 19 straks klart

Annex 19 - The Next Steps In Proactive Safety Management

By Danielle Kelly

inShare

For the first time in 30 years, ICAO are set to release a new Annex - Annex 19 - that pulls together current safety management practices and future expectations for facilitating safety risks that exist in our lands and skies.
The Annex looks to promote and enhance the alignment between the state and service providers and operators, which in my opinion should be welcomed and can only be a positive thing. Sharing and learning from each other is good, it's what we are taught as kids and is something we would do well to remember as adults. ICAO have provided us with Annex after Annex of standards and regulations depicting how things should be done in the industry, with lots of references to safety for operation of aircrafts, air traffic services, aerodromes, and airworthiness. This new Annex brings together all of these different provisions to further embed safety oversight and systemic risk sharing, but shouldn't we be doing this already anyway?
There is a lot of emphasis on the management of safety risks, focusing on what we don't want to happen, and on the sharing of information. However, how worthwhile the sharing of information actually is depends on what is done with it. ICAO appear to be providing an answer to bridging the gap between simply being aware of other industry incidents and proactively managing and implementing further mitigation strategies to prevent the same thing from occurring on our own watch. But why has it taken a new Annex to be published for us to do this, shouldn't this be something we should be doing as part of working practice? How do organisations learn and share?