A regulator's Safety Policy drives a service provider's Safety Plan and enables Safety Criteria to be identified. For the Airspace Design team, the crucial question speaks to the criteria to be used to determine the adequate safety of the PBN-based Airspace Concept. As such, the Airspace Design team must decide upon the safety criteria to be used, as determined by the Safety Policy.
This Safety Policy will normally be set externally to the project but if it does have to be established by the project team, it is vital that it is agreed at highest level early in the developments. Safety criteria may be qualitative or quantitative (often a mix of both is used). The Safety Policy has to be known at the outset of the project. Safety Policy concerns itself with questions like:
- Which Safety Management System?
- Which Safety Assessment Methodology?
- What evidence is needed that the design is safe?
Support and guidance from the regulatory authorities at this stage is extremely beneficial and therefore they are recommended to be involved in the Implementation team. Similarly, the safety manager should be available to the design team to provide guidance and assistance.
The in-depth analysis of the Reference Scenario in Activity 4 provides direct input to the new Airspace Concept of the project being undertaken. In deciding the project’s objectives and scope, it is necessary to know how a project’s success can be measured in terms of performance. This is what will need to be demonstrated to fulfil the operational requirements identified. The performance targets may be purely operational but also maybe efficiency driven. For example, the project may be considered to be a success when its strategic objectives are satisfied. So – if the strategic objectives are to double the throughput on runway X, if this is demonstrated in a real-time simulation of the (new) Airspace Concept, this is a strong indication that the project will satisfy this performance criterion. Similarly, the performance target might be technically driven, with the planned withdrawal of ground-based NAVAIDs for either financial or spectrum reasons. The success factor will be to demonstrate that this rationalisation does not impact operations or degrade safety.