ICAO EUR/NAT Runway Safety Go-Team mission in Morocco

ICAO and the Runway Safety Programme Partners have been working together to minimize and mitigate the risks of runway incursions, runway excursions and other events linked to runway safety.

The Runway Safety Programme promotes the establishment of runway safety teams at airports as an effective means of reducing runway-related accidents and incidents. The Runway Safety Go-Team brings a voluntary multi-disciplinary assistance visit, an ad-hoc group of experts, to an airport. As a priority, this category of accidents was clearly defined in both ICAO’s Global Aviation Safety Plan and the European Regional Aviation Safety Plan (EUR RASP). The Global Runway Safety Action Plan was developed in collaboration with the Runway Safety Programme Partners and is linked to the ICAO Global Aviation Safety Plan. The current edition of the Global Aviation Safety Plan (GASP) identifies runway safety as a global safety priority.

Since 2016, when the deployment of Runway Safety Go-Teams was defined as the regional Safety Enhancement Initiative, ICAO’s EUR/NAT office has supported six Go-Team missions. This work was performed within the framework of the ICAO EUR/NAT Technical Assistance project 16003 “Runway Safety Go-team Missions” and with the support of donor States (France, Russia, Turkey) and international and regional organizations (ACI, CANSO Europe, EUROCONTROL, FAA, IATA, IFALPA)  which provided their experts to ensure multidisciplinary and multicultural approach.

Recently, the ICAO EUR/NAT Office organized a Runway Safety Go-Team mission to Rabat, Morocco. This mission, which was conducted from 18 to 20 June 2019, brought another accomplishment to the regional goal of establishing and improving of Runway Safety Team performance for all EUR/NAT international aerodromes. The Go-Team mission began with a workshop that was attended by 34 participants (pictured above) from Moroccan Civil Aviation Authorities, airports, air operators, air navigation service providers, ground handlers, civil and military. This was followed with practical exercises and resulted in a number of recommendations for further implementation by the CAA and service providers.

ICAO’s EUR/NAT Office is committed to continuing this work to improve safety in the region and to ensuring that flying will become even safer. There are three more Runway Safety Go-Team missions that are expected to be deployed by the end of 2019 in the EUR/NAT Regions.