Emerging trends in safety and risk management for 2025

From embracing new technologies to fostering greater industry collaboration and data sharing, we’ve identified three emerging trends in safety and risk management for 2025. These insights stem from the valuable discussions and presentations at a number of conferences our team attended towards the end of last year.

1. Adopting new technologies ?

Speakers at both the IASS and IATA WSOC conferences highlighted the transformative role of AI, predictive analytics, machine learning and digitalisation. These technologies are perceived as increasingly important for improving safety, enhancing efficiency, and boosting industry resilience by creating proactive safety management systems that anticipate and prevent incidents. For example, using technology to evolve from Safety I (reactive) to Safety II (proactive).?

2. Industry-wide collaboration and data sharing

Fostering stronger industry-wide collaborative solutions to mitigate evolving challenges and risks was a common theme at both events. IATA Director General WIllie Walsh highlighted the operational impacts of geopolitical tensions, such as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, as well as airspace closures and security issues like GPS jamming. The FSF IASS also emphasized global collaboration in aviation, with a focus on learning from emerging challenges like pandemic impacts, climate change, and cyber threats.?

There was also a call for broader implementation and expansion of SMS beyond airlines to all aviation sectors, such as air traffic management, airports, and maintenance organisations. The idea is to promote a more integrated and holistic approach to safety oversight. This is something that Rolls-Royce SMS have been talking about with regulators and operators from the same region for a while.??

3. Leverage learnings from past incidents to improve decision-making under challenging conditions

The Safety Forum in Brussels centred on improving the aviation industry’s ability to handle weather-related risks, emphasising training on aircraft systems for better weather radar usage, enhancing situational awareness, and integrating supplementary weather data into operational practices. The event underscored the importance of feedback loops from actual pilot reports and historical data which are used to improve training simulations and refine operational processes. What that highlighted was the need to enable pilots to anticipate and adapt to adverse weather scenarios through robust simulation-based training that leverages learnings from past incidents to improve decision-making under challenging conditions. This trend is echoed in a recent FSF paper on Learning from all operations (published on Skybrary), which highlights that lessons learned from one part of the aviation ecosystem can influence practices elsewhere, enhancing the resilience and adaptability of global aviation safety systems.?

Have you observed similar developments? We’d love to hear your insights and predictions in the comments below.