An audits and inspections programme for air operators allows to guarantee the internal compliance of the legal requirements authorities demand from an air company.
Every organization within the aviation industry with a certified approval within a European country, whether it is an air operator, a maintenance center, an aerodrome, or an organization of a different nature, must have a management system.
Within the management system of an air operator, there are several crucial components. One of them is the Safety Management System or SMS and another one is the quality management and compliance monitoring system. Both of them are of vital importance. The quality management and compliance monitoring system is the tool used to control that the operator complies with the requirements that the state, the aeronautical authorities and the organization itself have established.
The regulation governing the generalities of this field are the ORO.GEN.200 from the European Aviation Safety Agency or EASA. In this regulation is said that every operator must have an audits and inspections programme for air operators. The design of this audit programme and its planning are fundamental to show the authority and to internally analyze if there is a compliance with the legal requirements.
Next, we show some extracts of the regulation; its meaning and implications for an air operator are commented.
ORO.GEN.200 Management System
The operator shall establish, implement and maintain a management system that includes:
- A function to monitor compliance of the operator with the relevant requirements.
- Compliance monitoring shall include a feedback system of findings to the accountable manager to ensure effective implementation of corrective actions as necessary;
This point shows the need for the operator to have a system that includes, among other things, a function of quality and compliance monitoring. It means that it is mandatory, in order to comply with the authorities, that there are certain defined processes within the company to comply with the functions of the quality department and to make sure that there is a compliance of all the needed requirements.
EASA usually fill the regulations with Acceptable Means of Compliance (AMC) or Guidance Material (GM), which are nothing other than annexes to the regulations that specify how each of them must be applied.
One of the Acceptable Means of Compliance from the rule ORO.GEN.200 is shown below:
- AMC1 ORO.GEN.200(a)(6) Management system.
- Compliance monitoring documentation.
- The compliance monitoring programme.
- Schedule of the monitoring programme.
- Audit procedures.
- Reporting procedures.
- Follow-up and corrective action procedures.
- Recording system.
In this point, the documentation that must come with a compliance monitoring system is described. Among others, the schedule of the monitoring programme, audit procedures, reporting procedures, follow-up and corrective action procedures, and a recording system.
The elaboration and follow-up of this documentation and of the associated processes take an important part of the resources of the airlines, being an arduous task that generates an important amount of paper records that must be controlled, something that could also favor the appearance of duplicates.
Systems to manage the Audits and Inspections programme for air operators
The system that many operators are choosing to obtain a higher efficiency when facing these challenges is to have a support software for the compliance monitoring, like SICOMO.
The ideal scenario is that this software supports as many tasks associated with the quality management and the compliance monitoring as possible, like regulations and other updated standards, audits plans management and its development, management of the non-compliances, generation of reports, etc.
SICOMO solution offers a support to the audits and inspections programme for air operators in all these aspects, which translates into big benefits for the airline as they achieve a big decrease in the working time, as well as a higher complying security with the authorities compared to when the work is done manually or with a less efficient application.
If you want to know more about how to do the verifications of your Audits and inspections programme for Air Operators in a simple and fast way, we invite you to subscribe to the EASA Quality Compliance Newsletter. You will receive information about better practices so you can properly prepare your internal and external audits, and also know how to perform them, what interviews to do and what evidence should be gathered during the process.
