Connecting the dots: the future of aviation safety intelligence with Data4Safety
What if there could be a Europe-wide programme that identifies systemic safety risks at EU level, as well as their mitigations? There already is: Data4Safety (D4S).
The programme, led by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), enables EU Member States and the aviation industry to join forces to work for safety on a scale not seen before in European aviation. Data4Safety today includes airports, Member States, airlines, air traffic management organisations, and aircraft manufacturers – and the programme is keen to welcome more stakeholders, including additional airports.
The aim is to significantly increase the safety intelligence capacity in Europe through the comprehensive collection of aviation data and the organisation of analytical capacity. Combining both has led to shared metrics, blind benchmarking, vulnerability discovery, and even directed studies on priority safety topics. How does such a massive undertaking come about? What unique role do airports play, and what actionable insights and capabilities can they gain?
This month’s Five Minute Feature offers the answers from both an EASA and airport perspective. Léopold Viroles, Data4Safety Programme Manager at EASA, and Martin Buelow, Vice President EASA Safety and Compliance Management at Fraport AG, reveal the collaborative foundations of the programme, the power of shared safety intelligence, and how airports – from large to small – can use Data4Safety to strengthen risk management, enhance predictive capabilities, and contribute to a safer, smarter European aviation system.
Data4Safety (D4S) was born from a shared recognition that improving aviation safety requires moving beyond segregated data silos towards collective safety intelligence. For Léopold (EASA), D4S is rooted in a long-standing ambition to continuously aim for even higher safety performance levels across Europe. ‘There was no collaborative platform to share the data being produced across aviation organisations. Centralisation allows us to try to infer unprecedented insights that would give us data-driven facts or ‘intelligence’, to understand where the risks are, and to be able to mitigate them,’ he explains. The programme is built around collaboration and trust: ‘D4S is first and foremost about building a trust environment, with a common objective of improving aviation safety.’
For Martin (Fraport AG), the value of the programme lies in what shared data reveals that individual organisations cannot see alone. ‘As individuals, we only have our set of data. That could be only half or even a third of the data available about a certain situation,’ he says. By bringing together information from across airports, airlines, manufacturers, and authorities, Data4Safety allows participants to compare experiences and learn from one another. ‘If you only rely on your own data, you might find a solution, but perhaps not the best solution,’ he adds. ‘That’s why such a programme is so valuable for each domain in the aviation sector.’
Airports bring a unique dimension to Data4Safety because no two airport environments are the same. For Martin, this diversity is precisely what makes airport data so valuable. ‘An A320 is essentially an A320, regardless of airline. But if you go to individual airports, you see the differences – how the infrastructure is part of the equation, and the context,’ he explains. Those differences offer insights not always visible to other stakeholders as they bring operational and infrastructural factors into the safety picture. ‘Airports are so different – this is what airports can bring into the programme; giving information about unique and specific contexts that was not necessarily available before.’
For Léopold, airports are also essential because of their key role in contributing to the management of priority aviation safety risks and system-wide collaboration. ‘There is no way around it, we need the airports on board to be able to assess safety risk in a 360 degree manner,’ he says, noting that many safety issues require airport input to understand how risks materialise and should be modelled. ‘At the same time, the data potential of airports is massive,’ he explains, though realising that value depends on aligning and standardising data so ‘we are able to compare apples with apples’. For him, that collaborative effort is central to enriching the programme’s overall safety intelligence and expanding the value D4S can deliver and what it can achieve.
For Martin, the real value of D4S dashboards lies in helping airports see what they may not yet see themselves. ‘Airports need a holistic view of everything that is reported,’ he says, pointing out that many lower-risk occurrences are reported into central repositories but may never reach the airport as part of its day-to-day safety picture. The dashboards help provide that broader view, whilst benchmarking allows airports to compare their risk profile with peers and learn from how others have addressed similar issues. ‘You aren’t having to solve a problem from the beginning, you are learning from others – that’s the strength of the system,’ he says. Rather than simply identifying risks experienced individually, the outputs can help airports start conversations with others facing the same challenges and build from proven approaches.
For Léopold, that exchange of data and insight is part of a wider ‘win-win’ built into the programme. Whilst D4S provides an unprecedented system-level view of safety risks, it also gives participating organisations a much richer picture of their own operations. ‘The dashboards that you get access to as a member offer a better understanding of your own operations,’ he explains, whilst benchmarking can offer both motivation and inspiration. Just as importantly, he stresses that data alone is not enough. ‘It is one thing to create a repository of information, but it can become a graveyard of data if it is not utilised,’ he says. ‘What is needed is the full production line – transformation, turning it into an actionable insight. D4S organises that in a collaborative manner as multiple experts are required at different stages in the transformation processes,, and that contributes to EASA’s core mission of the highest level of safety and performance.’
That practical value may be especially significant for smaller airports and authorities without extensive in-house analytical capability. As Martin notes, ‘this is a chance for them to at least take part – finding something and gaining value out of extensive data analysis,’ he says. ‘The shared platform also helps streamline and capitalise investment,’ Léopold adds. ‘It is about reducing the duplication of efforts and offering efficiency – this might be a less visible dimension of the programme, but it’s a particularly relevant one, especially for our smaller-size member organisations who gain a lot back from this pooled resource.’
The sheer volume of data in D4S is unprecedented. What new capabilities could airports gain in anticipating and preventing safety risks before they occur? For Martin, the predictive potential of D4S lies partly in what remains to be discovered. With such large volumes of data available, he sees Artificial Intelligence as key to detecting trends, anomalies and correlations that may otherwise remain hidden. ‘You have so much data nowadays that it is very hard to know what to do with it. We need AI to find trends, anomalies, correlations we’ve never noticed or discovered before,’ he says. At the same time, he is quick to stress that predictive capability depends on one critical foundation: data quality. ‘Predictability based on wrong data naturally makes wrong predictions,’ he notes, arguing that ensuring valid, reliable data is as important as the advanced analytics applied to it. In that sense, one of D4S’s emerging capabilities may be to help airports not only anticipate risks earlier but also improve the quality of the data that underpins those insights in the first place.
Léopold sees an opportunity to balance that analytical power with disciplined safety risk management. ‘Think of Big Data as a very powerful horse, running very fast: we need to channel this energy into the right safety topics,’ he says, describing the challenge of turning vast search and modelling capabilities into meaningful preventative action. ‘It is an energetic foal we must tame – if we really want impact, we need to crunch data with advanced solutions to discover insights in the data we may never have seen before, for the benefit of the top safety topics with the European aviation sector.’
For Léopold, it is essential to direct these tools towards the priority risks that matter most at system level. That includes drawing value from increasingly diverse data sources – from engineering data and imagery to narrative safety reports – and combining human- and machine-generated inputs to strengthen both. ‘We can use one to correct the weaknesses of the other,’ he explains. ‘A great human-created safety report can be enhanced by an AI that spots an anomaly – whilst human expertise can adjust and enrich machine-automated data recording.’
With so much sensitive operational data flowing into the programme, trust and security are foundational to Data4Safety. Protecting data relies on layers of safeguards rather than any single solution, argues Léopold. ‘There is no silver bullet,’ he says, pointing to a combination of encryption, secure European cloud hosting, strong collaborative governance and supervision, legal instruments and strict protocols formally agreed by all D4S members. Just as important is the programme’s trusted third-party platform provider model, designed so even EASA cannot access certain parts of the digital system, reinforcing confidence among participants. ‘There are real legal liabilities being put in place between organisations sharing their data, and this designated third party provider, which is fundamental in creating a trust environment,’ – trust that is built as much through governance as through technology. It is perhaps a fitting reflection of the programme itself: ambitious by design, but carefully and sensibly structured.
And that collaborative vision is only expanding. With the programme nearing completion and the full infrastructure operational, both Martin and Léopold describe this as an exciting moment for airports to engage. ‘D4S is available and ready to be used – we are already using it, and continuing to grow it,’ Martin says. ‘The door is open for interested airports: reach out to us at Data4Safety@easa.europa.eu to learn more about the onboarding process. Interested airports can also contact me directly at m.buelow@fraport.de for a pre-discussion, to understand more about how we engage airports and how the airport family is represented at governing level.’
What about the future of this ambitious programme? ‘I hope it’s bright!’ Martin says. For
Léopold, ‘there is a lot still to be done, but the main obstacles and challenges have been well-addressed by the D4S Members since the launch of the initiative. It is certainly an interesting time to join.’
For airports considering how to strengthen safety intelligence, benchmark performance, or contribute to a broader European safety picture, the message is clear: this is a great moment for airports to come on board.
