Big safety concerns have been raised with the planned sacking of up to 600 Airservices Australia staff.

Airservices Australia oversees administration of Australia’s airspace, and is looking to cut employees from corporate services, most of whom work in Canberra and Brisbane.

The company says “frontline” employees including air-traffic controllers and firefighters will be exempt from the cuts.

The agency is legally-obliged to carry out a safety review of job losses, but has not made its findings public.

Professionals Australia – the union for Airservices’ engineers and technicians – says the loss of some of those who applied for a redundancy package could compromise the company’s work.

“If they've done a safety review, they should be sharing the results with staff and with the public,” Mr Smith told Fairfax.

“We need to see that they've covered off all the likely safety risks of a change of this magnitude.

“There's too much public interest at stake in ensuring that we don't have unnecessary dangers creep into the delivering of our air services.”

Airservices says it has completed the safety review as required, and is now “working through a detailed and thorough process to reduce the size of our corporate centre and ensure the safety of our operations is maintained”.

“We understand the difficulty and uncertainty this [redundancy process] creates for staff and we want to progress through this as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson told reporters.

“We will continue to deliver our air-traffic control and aviation-rescue firefighting services to serve our customers during this internal change.

“Streamlining our corporate centre is a necessary process if we are to become a more efficient and agile business.”

Reports say the government-owned corporation could cut up to 900 of its 4400 people.

The reasons appear largely financial, with the company set to make a loss of about $13.5 million this year.