ELVIRA® Our Automated Safety Tool to Upgrade Your Safety System

Why you need to upgrade your safety

The demand for air travel is growing continuously, and so is the traffic. According to a study conducted by IATA, traffic is expected to double over the upcoming 20 years. 7.2 billion air passengers are expected in 2035. Thus, civil aviation authorities, ANSP (Air Navigation Service Provider), airports and all civil aviation stakeholders must adjust to the increasing demand.

This traffic growth will have a major impact on safety. Therefore, it is considered as a priority for ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). To prepare the international community to deal with increasing safety issues, ICAO amended the Annex 19 in 2016. The initial principles of the Annex have been restructured to facilitate the implementation of the State Safety Program (SSP) and Safety Management System (SMS).

Since safety management takes time to fully mature, it is important to start implementing it right away. Regulators and ANSP must address safety risks more strategically and, equip themselves with facilitating tools.

How ELVIRA® can help you

ELVIRA® is an automated tool, developed and used by the DSNA (the French ANSP) for three main applications: safety management, technical assessment and environment assessment. Today, ELVIRA® is the centerpiece of safety management at Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport. Three main functionalities are used for safety.

The playback allows the safety manager to playback the sequences the way they happened on the Air Traffic Controller screen. It also allows to add the communications between the pilot and the Air Traffic Controller.

The statistics allow the safety manager to manage an important amount of data and export it, to share it with other control centers. With ELVIRA®, the French ANSP no longer needs to analyse events one by one: the software processes a large amount of data simultaneously. Not only does it allow a faster safety management process, but it also allows to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your system.

ELVIRA® is also widely used for detecting the loss of separation. ELVIRA® can detect, analyse and categorise all occurrences. This large-scale analysis allows the ANSP to understand what it should work on to improve its safety.

Finally, ELVIRA® has many other assets such as interrupted approach detection (to secure the landings), runway incursion detection (to avert collision between vehicles), aircraft counting, etc.

How ELVIRA® helped the French ANSP to improve safety

The added-value of ELVIRA® and other automated tools has been observed in the past few years. Indeed, ELVIRA® allowed the French ANSP to automatise and facilitate safety management by gathering, analysing and managing safety data. It offers a complement to the Air Traffic Controller reports by bringing an objective perspective.The ANSP can analyse its entire safety system, see what needs to change and bring up corrective actions. Between 2009 and 2015, the DSNA observed a reduction of the amount of loss of separation as well as a reduction of their gravity using ELVIRA®.