Airline crew members will be shielded from reprisals when they report incidents to air safety authorities, according to new legislation agreed by all EU institutions yesterday (17 December).
The European Parliament's transport committee endorsed a compromise text yesterday (17 December), negotiated with EU member states earlier in December, on new EU rules aimed at strengthening air safety and accident prevention, also known as the regulation on "occurrence reporting".
"The agreement reached between the Parliament and the Council is a true progress for air safety in Europe," said centre-right MEP Christine de Veyrac (European People's Party, France), the rapporteur on the dossier. "The negotiations were difficult but it was essential to ensure that the strengthening of air safety is above any other consideration," she said.
The inter-institutional compromise tackles both technical issues and what is known as the "Just culture" dimension, "the core objective" of the proposal, which lays more solid ground for protection of employees and crew members who report safety incidents.
The agreement will introduce an appeal mechanism for employees who find themselves punished in some way for reporting an incident related to air safety as well as penal protection for the whistleblower in all 28 EU member states.
The regulation also foresees a mandatory closed list of examples of incidents that must be reported if they occur, while safeguarding the possibility for a voluntary based mechanism of reporting incidents not included in the list. In both cases, the reported problems will have to be relayed to the competent national authorities, the airline company, the manufacturer of the plane or the European Air Safety Authority (EASA) depending on the nature of the problem.
More importantly, the text will make it possible for whistleblowers in countries where legal protection is lower or people who are employed in small airlines where fear of self-incrimination tends to be greater, to directly notify the problems to the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) if they are afraid of repercussions at home.
As an example, in France there are 42,000 reported incidents per year, while in Slovenia the number drops to two a year, a difference which is "obviously due to fear of repercussions and self-incrimination."
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