Airport Safety Week: Our Airport, Our Community
Canberra Airport will host its sixth annual Airport Safety Week from 14-18 October 2019. Each year Airport Safety Week is conducted at airports across Australia to educate both employees and the public about many of the activities that airports implement to maintain the strict safety culture required at Australian airports.
This year’s Airport Safety Week theme, ‘Our Airport, Our Community’ has a focus on community and mental health and wellbeing. Activities during the week will help all airport employees learn more about critical safety operations beyond their everyday work and identify ways to collaborate for the best safety and wellbeing outcomes.
This year’s events will begin on Monday, 14 October with a launch attended by special guests Suzanne Orr, MLA, the ACT’s Minister for Employment and Workplace Safety, Greg Hood, Chief Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and Greg Jones, ACT Work Safety Commissioner.
“We take great pride in Airport Safety Week each year,” says Stephen Byron, CEO of Canberra Airport. “It’s a great initiative that helps airport employees learn more about critical safety operations, forge new bonds with other teams and focus on wellbeing. We all have a responsibility to look out for our colleagues, their safety and their wellbeing, and we see those positive results in the excellent experience we create for our customers.”
Employees and contractors of the Canberra Airport will participate in educational tours to discover more about the importance of safety planning and procedures and understand safety activities undertaken by colleagues meeting requirements for airport operations to ensure the terminal, passengers and co-workers are safe.
Activities include a foreign object debris (FOD) walk that includes inspecting the airfield for debris that could potentially damage planes and an airside inspection with our operations team to inspect the surface, lighting and navigation aids of runways and taxiways. Airport employees will also have opportunities to take part in tours with an Australian Border Force (ABF) officer and SNP Security to see how they keep Australia’s borders and airports safe. Finally, employees will be able to take a Qantas hangar tour and a tour of Canberra Airport’s Aviation Rescue Fire Fighting Services station to discover what it is like to be an aviation engineer and firefighter.
Airport Safety Week is a joint initiative of the Australian Airports Association and the New Zealand Airports Association.