Air Traffic Management and Crisis Resilience in the DARWIN Project

ENAV is the Italian Air Traffic Management (ATM) provider. ENAV has extensive and recognised experience in areas such as safety management (including Risk Assessment and Safety Cases), resilience, operations and validation processes.

ENAV’s role in the DARWIN project is focused on improving knowledge in the domain of resilience. ENAV continuously defines contingency plans for situations regarding, for example, emergency or business continuity, through different contingency levels, including disaster recovery.

ENAV will use DARWIN results to improve current risk management operations and procedures in the ATM context. Accordingly, concepts and lessons learned will be endorsed with the objective of improving training and best practices (locally and at national level).

So far, ENAV has been involved in the DARWIN literature review, and initial coordination with partners.

In order to provide valuable input to DARWIN’s current task “Evaluation of resilience concepts for crisis management”, ENAV has begun sharing its knowledge and experience on ATM practices when managing crises and expected/unexpected situations.

In 2016 ENAV will begin cooperation with the Italian National Institute of Health (Instituto Superiore di Sanità) in order to begin pilot cases to test the DARWIN resilience guidelines. It is noteworthy that this is the very first project that involves sectors as diverse as Air Traffic Management (ATM) and healthcare. These sectors have been carefully selected due to their significant social impact and involvement during crises. The experience gained from these test cases will improve project results and add value to established risk management practices and guidelines.

Moreover, the DARWIN project will allow cross-fertilization between different sectors and disciplines, improve knowledge dissemination and start fruitful discussions between ATM and healthcare stakeholders in cases of crisis and critical event (expected and unexpected) management.

ENAV participated in the first DARWIN CoCRP (Community of Crisis and Resilience practitioners) Webinar on 17th November. The webinar demonstrated that using available technologies to communicate the project’s objectives and results will play a role in disseminating the project’s results to the CoCRP and beyond.