At a recent industry conference, IATA safety director Mark Searle outlined the organisation's push for closer alignment between personnel, technological tools, and internationally agreed standards as a path toward advancing aviation safety. Addressing delegates at the IATA World Safety and Operations Conference, Searle noted that the rate of fatal accidents had dropped from one in every 3.5 million flights to one in every 5.6 million over the preceding ten years.
Throughout 2025, aviation accidents claimed 394 lives — a toll that, according to Searle, reinforces the drive for improvement, with future gains in safety expected to come from people, technology, and standards functioning together as an integrated, resilient system.
Three areas of focus were put forward by IATA to keep safety standards intact as a younger cohort of aviation workers takes on roles across the industry. Retaining operational knowledge across organisations, IATA indicated, depends on putting in place a deliberate framework drawing on mentoring relationships, targeted training, and well-designed succession arrangements.
Pairing the institutional knowledge held by seasoned professionals with the data literacy and artificial intelligence fluency that younger workers bring could allow organisations to draw on the full depth of both groups, according to the body's position. The capacity of an industry to learn from close calls and mistakes depends on workers feeling able to flag hazards and errors without facing repercussions — a condition that advocates say underpins the prevention of future accidents.
Searle described the sector as having spent years constructing what he called an authentically uncommon achievement — a safety culture oriented around openness, where workers flag their own mistakes and those errors feed into shared learning across the workforce. Passing the work along to those who follow, he observed, depended on a thread of shared purpose that stretched between one generation and the next.
On the role of technology in aviation safety, IATA's position holds that tools such as AI are intended to support the judgement of safety professionals — helping them read situations and act on sound information — while systems remain fully functional even when those tools go offline or are otherwise rendered unavailable. Searle acknowledged that digital tools hold the potential to flag hazards at an earlier stage and drive preventive measures before a near-miss escalates into a full incident, while cautioning that no technological solution on its own can substitute for the broader safeguards required.
Documented increases in Global Navigation Satellite System interference have drawn attention to how aviation technology functions more reliably when layered alongside redundant systems, established procedures, crew training, and the exercise of human judgement.
Airline accident rates among carriers listed on the IOSA registry have historically run lower than those outside it, a pattern that points to shared international frameworks — when paired with active regulatory enforcement — as a factor in aviation safety outcomes, according to IATA's presentation. The aviation body's position holds that the industry's most pressing safety problems arise not from an absence of established rules, but from uneven application and enforcement of those rules across different operators and regulators.
Searle argued that meaningful advances in safety would not come from producing additional standards documents. The aviation body's position centred on three areas: directing oversight resources toward the highest-risk operations, strengthening national adherence to international obligations around conflict-zone hazard data and accident reporting, and updating technical requirements to keep pace with shifts in technology, operational practice, and regulatory frameworks.
Searle argued that the aviation system's overall robustness depends on people, technology, and standards working in concert across areas such as runway safety, GNSS interference, conflict zones, and accident investigations — noting that a gap in any one of those areas leaves the broader framework more exposed.
