Safety: high priority at the airport

Safe flight operations: common standards

The European Union has set common standards for the planning, operation and maintenance of airports, which we are also obliged to implement. Munich Airport’s operating license is directly dependent on renewal of its EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency) certification, which was granted in December 2017. Under this certification, the airport must demonstrate constant compliance with relevant requirements to the supervisory authority responsible for us, the South Bavarian Aviation Office at the District Government of Upper Bavaria. We have a safety management system as one way to achieve these aims. Through the system, the airport continuously monitors ongoing flight and handling operations with an eye to risks and trends in order to identify targeted actions early on. To meet the requirements, we make structural changes in the infrastructure relevant to flight operations or to the operational and organizational processes in keeping with EASA specifications, utilizing safety risk assessments and compliance checks in the process. In 2023, this approach was also helpful in minimizing the risk of accidents and continuously and actively improving the safety of flight operations.

Low bird strike rate: special biotope management

Collisions between aircraft and heavyweight birds or flocks of birds can endanger the safety of flight operations. We use a special biotope management to prevent possible collisions:

• The nutrient-poor meadow areas are mowed only twice a year, as long grass makes it difficult for predatory birds to find prey. Swarming birds, in turn, avoid these areas because of the lack of visual contact with each other.
• The terrain on and around the airport is unattractively designed for bird species that pose a critical risk.
• The drainage channels near the take-off and landing runways are spanned by steel ropes in order to make access difficult, particularly for waterfowl.
• The wildlife management team at the traffic control department monitors the bird population at the airport grounds and in relevant biotopes within the vicinity in order to ward off potential dangers from bird flight movements at an early stage. If necessary, it takes action to scare away birds.

We work closely with the relevant partners and institutions on the topic of bird strike prevention, particularly with the airlines, German air traffic control, regional and higher-level authorities, and DAVVL (the German Committee for the Prevention of Bird Strikes in Air Traffic). DAVVL statistics have shown a comparatively low wildlife strike rate for Munich Airport for many years. In 2023, it was around 32 percent higher on average in Germany than at the Munich airport site.

Flood water protection: regular inspection

The existing watercourse system protects Munich Airport from flood runoff, which statistically occurs on average once every hundred years. An initial investigation in 2019 had already shown that this also applies to extreme flooding during flash floods from the southern catchment area. Since 2021, we have been continuously monitoring drainage safety within the airport, taking into account possible hydraulic overloading of the sewer system based on various extreme heavy rainfall scenarios, among other things. We assess and prioritize property and area-related risks in order to proactively reduce potential heavy rain risks to an acceptable level through structural and operational measures.

We also regularly check the performance of the sewer system to ensure proper drainage. In the case of new buildings, we design the wastewater pipes and infiltration systems in accordance with the recommendation of the Bavarian water management authorities to anticipate rainfall events with a return period of ten years. Decentralized rainwater management and flood-resistant site planning are also important measures for us to minimize the impacts of flooding as much as possible.