EUROCONTROL voluntary ATM incident reporting (EVAIR) safety bulletin 19

The first EUROCONTROL voluntary ATM incident reporting (EVAIR) safety bulletin of 2018 makes use of some 14,000 ATM reports from aircraft operators and air navigation service (ANSPs) for the period 2012 - 2016 to produce both European and global air traffic management (ATM) safety statistics and trends.

Some of the main events reported for the 2012 - 2016 period include the:

continuing proliferation of RPAS which affect final approach most, but also begin appearing at higher altitudes;
around 600 GPS outages recorded, most often affecting the politically sensitive Black Sea-Caspian Sea axis;
increase in ACAS RAs and most notably false TCAS RAs recorded in 2016;
persistent laser interference problems and attempts by some states to address them;
increase in call sign confusions in 2016 and how EUROCONTROL’s Call Sign De-Confliction Tool (CSST) can help;
upward trend of ‘Air-Ground communication’, ‘Mistakes’, ‘Lapses’, ‘Coordination’ and ‘Traffic and Airspace problems’ in 2016.

The participants in the EVAIR mechanism took great strides forward in 2016, reducing the number of days spent investigating reports from 67 days in 2015 to just 26 days in 2016 while keeping the high level of the investigation quality.

At the request of EUROCONTROL, the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) safety department conducted an analysis of selected topics related to ATM reports. This independent analysis enables EUROCONTROL to perform high-level comparisons of the data and information captured by EVAIR. The scope of this analysis included research of ASRs for 2012 to 2016. During this period, a total of 966,811 reports were submitted and collated into STEADES.