A Look at the EASA Safety Review 2025
Knowledge / September 17, 2025
Key Findings of the EASA Safety Review 2025
The recently published EASA Safety Review 2025 provides a comprehensive analysis of aviation safety in 2024 and compares it with trends from the past decade. While the ASR 2025 confirms that Europe remains one of the safest regions for aviation, it also emphasises that vigilance is essential. The industry must continue monitoring risks, learning from occurrences, and adapting to emerging challenges such as drone integration and new technologies.
Traffic Recovery Continues: The European aviation industry continued its strong recovery in 2024. There were 623 air operator certificate (AOC) holders operating more than 7,000 commercial aeroplanes for the first time since 2019. Commercial air transport operations with complex aeroplanes alone conducted over 7.7 million flights, demonstrating the aviation industry’s resilience and operational capacity. Overall passenger traffic reached 96% of 2019 pre-pandemic levels.
Safety Performance Across Domains: The 2025 review shows consistent safety performance across different aviation sectors. Commercial air transport maintained strong safety standards, while general aviation showed improvement with reduced incident rates compared to recent years. Sailplanes achieved a notable milestone with the lowest level of annual incidents ever recorded in this domain of aviation.
Growing UAS Integration: The reporting of occurrences involving UAS continues to increase, underlining the growing importance of their safe integration into the European airspace. This is a key part of EASA’s U-Space implementation. This trend highlights the need for adaptive safety management systems that can handle traditional and emerging aviation technologies.
“We are continuously expanding our safety intelligence capabilities by improving and optimising the available dataset, integrating new data sources and relevant information to help our decision making. Our ability to process this increasing volume of data and information and turn it into meaningful intelligence for the whole industry is becoming more important.”
Florian Guillermet, Foreword to EASA Safety Review 2025
Evolution of Data Integration in Safety Management
Enhanced European Risk Classification Scheme (ERCS)
Building on developments from previous years, the domain-specific appendices continue to be fully based on ECR data using the European Risk Classification Scheme (ERCS) as coded by the national aviation authorities. This standardized approach enables:
- More precise risk prioritization across different aviation domains
- Enhanced comparability of safety data across member states
- Improved identification of emerging safety trends
- Better integration between safety reporting and risk assessment
From Data to Action
The EASA Safety Review serves as a key input to the European Plan for Aviation Safety (EPAS), which translates safety data into actionable priorities. The latest EPAS 2025 edition identifies 211 safety issues across European aviation, with 20 classified as higher-risk and 8 representing newly identified concerns. This complexity demonstrates why modern aviation operations require integrated approaches that can handle diverse data sources, operational domains, and regulatory requirements.
Continuous monitoring of risks, learning from occurrences, and adapting to emerging challenges, such as drone integration and new technologies, remain critical.
The Role of Integrated Safety Management Systems
The EASA Safety Review 2025 reinforces the importance of robust Safety Management Systems (SMS). However, the complexity revealed in the 2025 data highlights the evolution toward operations-critical platforms that can:
- Seamlessly integrate safety, quality, and compliance data
- Apply standardized risk classification schemes across operational domains
- Support emerging technologies within unified frameworks
- Enable real-time data collection and analysis across distributed operations
Modern aviation operations benefit from platforms that recognize the interconnected nature of safety, quality, training, and compliance functions, providing seamless data flow between them.
Looking Forward
The EASA Safety Review 2025 shows Europe’s continued leadership in aviation safety while highlighting evolving challenges that demand new operational approaches. The emphasis on integrated data analysis through ERCS and the growing complexity of operations make a compelling case for a unified platform that connects safety, quality, training, and risk management.
As the industry continues to evolve with new technologies and operational paradigms, the ability to collect, integrate, and analyze data across all operational functions will become critical for maintaining operational excellence.
iQSMS is specifically designed to support this integrated approach, helping aviation organizations of all sizes manage safety, compliance, and risk efficiently.
Find out more about the iQSMS core modules here.
For More Information:
Download the full EASA Annual Safety Review 2025:
https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/document-library/general-publications/annual-safety-review-2025
European Plan for Aviation Safety (EPAS) 2025:
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