Overall Safety Assessment for Luxembourg Airport

At presumably every airport, there are deviations from regulatory infrastructure-related requirements due to local conditions (e.g. geographical, growth or wear-related, ...). These can be minor deviations, such as locally limited excessive transverse slopes on the runway, or major ones, such as a shortening of the approach lighting due to a larger road.

Safety Assessments for local infrastructural deviations

According to ICAO or EASA, any deviation must be addressed with a Safety Assessment to investigate potential associated hazards and risks, and to determine corrective actions. Provided the analysis after mitigation does not reveal any safety concerns, infrastructural deviations can be accepted during the certification process using EASA's flexibility tools – Equivalent Level of Safety (ELOS), Special Condition (SC) and Deviation Acceptance and Action Document (DAAD).

Interactions between individual infrastructural deviations

The Safety Assessment proves that airport operations are not negatively affected by a local infrastructural deviation. Obviously, it can happen that there are several local deviations from the regulatory requirements (e.g. according to EASA ADR.CS) at an airport. Although each deviation in itself does not represent a safety issue, it may occur that interactions arise from different deviations, whereby some risks reinforce each other or even new hazards evolve. However, this is not taken into account in individual Safety Assessments for the application for EASA flexibility tools.

Analysis of the interaction between individual deviations

airsight was commissioned by Luxembourg Airport to investigate such interactions between all deviations detected on the airfield. At Luxembourg Airport, some minor deviations have been identified at various locations, which were initially geographically located on the airfield (see first image above).
For each deviation, mitigation measures for hazards and associated risks have been derived in individual Safety Assessments. For airsight, the task was to ensure that individual mitigation measures did not adversely affect the risk in other areas. This turned out to be a complex and multi-faceted task, which was initially solved with the help of a two-way comparison in a matrix (see second image above). This allowed the first possible dependencies of individual deviations to be identified.

Geolocation of deviations and associated hazards

In a next step, the geolocation of all deviations was used to expand the two-dimensional examination of the interactions (see third image above). The visualisation of the precise location of the deviations helped to identify additional hazards resulting from the interplay of individual deviations. A total of 253 interactions were detected.

Assessment in collaboration with relevant stakeholders

In various workshops with all relevant stakeholders, possible new hazards that could result from the interactions were discussed, and risks and mitigation measures of the hazards from individual Safety Assessments were reviewed.
In the outcome, Luxembourg Airport was able to benefit from airsight's many years of experience in the complex investigation of interactions, adapt individual mitigation measures, and thus go beyond the minimum requirements for safety management.

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