Keeping the national airspace system the safest in the world and protected from terrorism will rely on strong leadership and industry teamwork--so says the Air Line Pilots Assn. in setting safety priorities for challenging times ahead.

Pilots from ALPA's 60,000 membership gathered Aug. 13-14 in Washington for the group's annual Air Safety and Security Forum to explore ways of building what ALPA President John Prater called "layers of protection."

The U.S. system, which operates 30,000 airline flights daily, has not had a fatal accident involving transport operations in two years. "What headwinds will industry safety leaders have to navigate?" asks the forum's keynote speaker, Hank Krakowski, FAA COO-Air Traffic Organization.

"Never before have we been given such challenges, and such opportunity," he says, inviting discussion on how best to prepare for "the transparent and high-tech world that is rapidly approaching."

Krakowski was referring to the NextGen modernized air traffic system to be implemented by 2025. Meanwhile, new aircraft--including very light jets, unmanned vehicles and commercial space planes--will be entering the airspace as world traffic triples and fuel costs and consolidation threaten airline survival.

"Leadership isn't confined to the cockpit," where the captain is the final authority, notes Prater. "Real leaders ensure that safety and security stretch across all disciplines of industry."

Noting the delicate balance between economics and safety, he added that "Many airlines push, threaten, manipulate and coerce pilots into potentially unsafe operations in order to achieve unrealistic operational flexibility and efficiency."

The fuel crisis, for example, as well as long-standing fatigue concern related to 60-year-old outdated rules that do not acknowledge work/duty limits, have caused some carriers to "Push crews into eroding safety margins below safe limits," says Prater. (At least one carrier has reported that airline management forced crews to fly with dangerously low reserves of fuel.)

Under NextGen, "a highly computerized digital flight experience... trends, events, errors could be easily identified, quantified and analyzed," says Krakowski. "It will require that our approach to safety must be the team approach. Anything less forces us to work against each other. We must get it [NextGen] right the first time--because the price tag tells us we won't get a second chance."

Krakowski was former United Airlines pilot and industry co-chair of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST), a joint FAA-industry effort. He says CAST demonstrably improved the world fatal accident rate. But now with the accident rate so low [the fatal accident rate in 2007 was 0.1 per 100 million passengers carried, and currently it is zero, according to the FAA] the CAST approach--based on forensic assessment of previous accidents--is no longer practical. It's time for industry to turn to "Cooperative data-sharing, rigorous analysis and full transparency--glued firmly together by political will not to hurt each other in the process," he says.