Stakeholders must continue to sustain safe, efficient air transportation – ICAO
ON November 8, 2017 4:08 PM / IN News / BYUgoh Solomon Chinonso
The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has called on stakeholders globally to continue to sustain safe, secure and efficient air transportation in order to improve the lives of people everywhere.
ICAO Council President, Dr Benard Aliu , made the call while speaking at the International Federation of Air Traffic Safety Electronics Associations (IFATSEA) 47th General Assembly in Montréal, Canada.
Aliu’s speech was posted on ICAO’s website on Wednesday.
He said: “As you embark on this year’s event, I will encourage you to keep in mind the transformational power of aviation to improve the lives of people everywhere.
“Aviation growth, and especially the number of direct routes between given destinations, correlates quite closely with the positive socio-economic impacts which result from this connectivity.”
According to him, the shared intent of all air transport stakeholders globally must be to sustain or improve how safely, securely, and efficiently the air transport network continues to perform despite its significant and continuous growth.
“It is against this background that ICAO has worked with great determination in recent years to bring our sector together to establish and update some essential strategic planning.
“Our complementary ICAO Global Plans for Aviation Safety and Air Navigation Capacity and Efficiency have established comprehensive targets to guide and align our respective objectives,” he noted.
Aliu reminded his IFATSEA audience that ICAO would be conducting its second Global Air Navigation Industry Symposium (GANIS) this December, and that their presence there would bring benefit to the proceedings being planned.
“The GANIS event is being conducted back to back with our related Safety and Air Navigation Implementation Symposium, and through these joint events we will be reviewing both our Safety and Air Navigation Global Plans in great detail.
“We will also be endeavouring to resolve some suitable methods to improve the operational performance of the air navigation system, and most especially where performance gaps have already been identified,” he said.
Aliu noted that one of the key areas where ICAO and IFATSEA cooperation had seen solid results was in the training domain.
He stressed that aviation sustainability was threatened on many fronts in light of the projected shortage of skilled personnel which had come to light in recent years, and that human resources development was therefore essential to the long-term viability of air transport operations.
“ICAO’s main responses have been to establish our Next Generation Aviation Professionals (NGAP) programme, to help align sectoral actions to confront this challenge, in addition to our Global Aviation Training Office (GAT).
“We have also been very grateful for the crucial support of IFATSEA on our ICAO Manual on Air Traffic Safety Electronics Personnel Competency-based Training and Assessment,” he said.
According to Aliu, ICAO’s No Country Left Behind initiative is striving to ensure that all States can access the benefits of air transport equally.
He said it was a priority which referenced ICAO’s efforts to help States take advantage of the fact that safe and dependable air transport operations enable the achievement of so many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targeted under the UN Agenda 2030.
“As ICAO pursues these objectives, which will have long lasting impacts on the peace and prosperity which is realised in countries far and wide, we also appreciate that greater progress can be achieved on the basis of the excellent cooperation established between ICAO, IFATSEA and other industry stakeholders,” he said.
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