The European Commercial Aviation Safety Team (ECAST) and the Commercial Aviation Safety Team in the USA (CAST), sponsor a number of groups aimed at improving aviation safety. The special group FAST operates under the umbrella of the ESSI (European Safety Strategy Initiative)/ECAST. ECAST aims at continuous improvements of effective safety systems leading to further reductions of the annual number of accidents and the annual number of fatalities irrespective of the growth of the air traffic.

Two main complementary approaches drive improvements in aviation safety: a) Historic or Forensic one based on accident analysis and b) a Prognostic one aiming at revealing Future hazards. In between these two area's, there are Diagnostic Safety initiatives, such as the EU occurrence reporting, FOQA, etc.

In brief, the FAST was developed to cope with the inherent limitation of the Historic/Forensic one. It aims to provide solutions to hazards that may result from changes in the aviation system.

In the future Global Aviation System, the aviation community will exploit the FAST concept to anticipate and prevent new safety hazards before they appear, and have plans in place to mitigate them should they occur.

Download the FAST presentation (PPT - 4.3Mb)

Download the FAST process (PPT - 46Kb)