Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle 1: “Lead obligation to safety through words and actions.”
Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle 5: “Create an atmosphere of trust, where employees are encouraged and confident to report safety-related information.”
Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle 8: “Regularly assess and improve organizational Safety Culture.”
Safety Leadership Charter, guiding thought: safety culture scales when leaders are visible, communication is two-way, and people trust the system enough to speak up.
Operating across 19 bases creates a very “distributed” airline: different local routines, different operational pressures, and different informal norms. That’s exactly where safety culture can quietly diverge - unless you deliberately design mechanisms that keep the organization behaving like one.
Within the SMS framework, Safety Promotion is the layer that turns the system into daily practice by combining safety communication and safety training, ensuring people are competent in their roles and that safety information flows both ways (frontline ↔ management).
Volotea’s Safety Promotion Enhancement is a portfolio of recurring, leader-anchored touchpoints designed to keep safety priorities aligned across the network, especially at base level (pilots and cabin crew), and where applicable also maintenance and ground handling teams.
The approach relies on three pillars:
Volotea runs Base Sponsor Meetings two times per year in every base: Pre-Ramp-Up (ahead of peak operations) and post-peak (after the high-intensity period). These sessions are used to “unify the company as one”, sharing company results and direction, and explicitly comparing overall operational safety performance with the base’s specific safety picture.
A key design choice is leadership visibility: at least one ExCom (senior leadership) member attends, reinforcing that safety is not a side topic, it is a business and operational priority.
These meetings also place strong emphasis on reporting culture. The sessions actively remind crews of the official channels to submit a Safety Report, the reporting workflow (what happens after submission), and, critically, the confidentiality principles that protect reporters. This “how reporting works” refresh is repeated deliberately, base after base, to keep the system credible and easy to use.
Recently, after completing the post-peak round across the bases, two enhancements were introduced:
In addition, during these base visits, a Safety representative provides a brief to senior leadership and actively promotes safety through focused workshops with Base Chief Pilots, Base Managers, and Duty Pilots, so local operational leadership becomes a multiplier of the same message and expectations.
Volotea runs an (almost) monthly session called Breakfast with Management, where one area of the company shares results and objectives. When Operations is the main topic, Safety gets dedicated time, presented jointly by the Safety Manager and the COO.
These events are held in person at HQ, with remote access for crews across the bases. Participation is meaningful: around 20% of company headcount is connected regularly. At the same time, it is operationally difficult for many crew members to join consistently due to roster limitations.
A key cultural point is that both Base Sponsor Meetings and Breakfast with Management are voluntary and are not rostered for crew, they rely on engagement rather than obligation. That makes the participation signal stronger (people are choosing to show up), but it also creates a structural limit on how far attendance can scale in a crew environment.
Once per year, Volotea awards a prize to the person who best represents the value of Safety at each base and at HQ. The intent is cultural reinforcement: making “doing the right thing” visible, specific, and socially rewarded—so safety becomes identity, not just compliance.
