Analysis and safety levels

Main trends of Safety in BULATSA for 2022

The registered occurrences during 2022, related to the safety in operational activities when providing Air Traffic Services (ATS), are as follows:  

• No aviation occurrences have been registered with severity class АА/А – accident/serious incident with contribution of ATS units.
• 2 Major incidents class B with contribution of ATS units.
• 2 Significant incidents class C with contribution of ATS units
• 10 incidents have been registered with severity class E, with contribution of ATS units, which had no immediate safety effect.
• 1474 incidents without contribution of ATS units, which are occurrences with severity class Е – without safety consequences, and severity class D – classified as unidentified occurrences without safety consequences.

Number of aviation incidents – trends:

For the period from 1997 to 2022, based on smoothed graph data for five and ten years respectively, there is a steady trend of retention of the level of safety for the last years.

In addition to the above, as a result of the annual SMS maturity survey – „EUROCONTROL CANSO SMS Standard of Excellence Measurement in 2022“, level D (Assured: Evidence is available to provide confidence that SMS processes and/or requirements are being applied appropriately and are delivering positive, measured results) was reported for all 16 measured areas except for „Development of a Positive and Proactive Safety Culture”, “Safety Performance Monitoring (Transversal Area)” and for “Coordination of Emergency Response Plan” – level C (Managed: SMS processes and/or requirements comply with ICAO Annex 19 and are formally documented and consistently applied). Considering the achieved result of 90% for the SMS maturity level of the 2022 survey, BULATSA is among the top group of 29 ANSPs from the European region with a summary score of C (70-91%).