ENAIRE reports the best safety results out of all European air navigation providers

ENAIRE, a state-owned company chaired by Pedro Saura, Secretary of State for Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda, has become the leading provider of air navigation services throughout Europe due to the maturity and effectiveness of its Operational Safety Management System. This is what the data from EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, show for the 30 providers evaluated.

At the European level, there is an indicator, called EoSM (Effectiveness of Safety Management), that measures the maturity and effectiveness of the safety management systems of air navigation service providers.

This indicator relies on a questionnaire that is completed by the air navigation provider and overseen and audited by the National Supervisory Authorities (NSAs) of each country, which in the case of Spain is the National Aviation Safety Agency (AESA); subsequently, EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency) ensures compliance with European regulations and, finally, EUROCONTROL publishes them.

According to this European EoSM standard, the level of maturity of ENAIRE's Security Management System reached 98.12% in 2019. This places ENAIRE at the top position in operational safety among the 30 air navigation providers that were analysed.

In addition, as in previous years, ENAIRE has achieved excellent results, especially in the area of Risk Management and in the areas of Safety Assurance and Safety Promotion.

Level of Effectiveness (%) of the EoSM system of the main European air navigation service providers

On a global scale, there is a similar indicator called SoE (Standard of Excellence). Based on the results published for 2019, ENAIRE is among the top four providers with the best rating worldwide, which shows the excellence of our Safety Management System.

Reduction in incidents of more than 50%
In addition, the rate of serious incidents in 2019, despite this year setting a record in air traffic, 2,149,648 flights managed by ENAIRE (+2.4%), including overflights, with an estimated passenger traffic of 320 million (+4.3%), remained at historically low levels.

This is reflected in the "Weighted Safety Level" indicator, which provides a measure of the number of serious incidents that occur in airspace controlled by ENAIRE.

This indicator provides information on what has already occurred so that, based on this information, preventive steps can be taken to keep similar events from taking place in the future. These steps can involve training, new technical systems, updated procedures or other measures, as appropriate.

In the last 10 years, ENAIRE has improved this indicator, which has seen a decrease of almost 87%. This means that, based on data from the close of 2019, serious incidents have been reduced to less than half in the last 5 years.
 
Change in the indicator of serious incidents in the last 10 years

Working to enhance safety
The results show the efforts being made by all ENAIRE professionals to build an increasingly safe, robust and efficient air navigation and control system. Along these same lines, ENAIRE's CEO, Ángel Luis Arias, always underscores that "flight safety is our first and most important strategic priority".

About ENAIRE
ENAIRE is the company of the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda that manages air navigation in Spain. It renders aerodrome control services at 21 airports, including the busiest in terms of air traffic, plus en-route and approach control, from five control centres: Barcelona, Madrid, Gran Canaria, Palma and Seville. In addition, ENAIRE provides communications, navigation and surveillance services to 45 air control towers.

In 2019, ENAIRE handled 2.1 million flights to and from four continents (Europe, America, Asia and Africa), transporting 320 million passengers.

ENAIRE is the fourth most important European air navigation service provider, and, in a clear commitment to the Single Sky initiative, belongs to international partnerships such as SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) Joint Undertaking, SESAR Deployment Manager, A6, iTEC, CANSO (Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation) and ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization).