The aviation industry is among the few industries in which the degree of error is near zero. Failure in the production process, lack of inspection or a failure in the documentation can be directly converted into disastrous results. That is why quality assurance in aviation is not a department, a checkbox, it is a regulated, delivered by structure, system incorporated into all the strata of aircraft construction, maintenance, and operation.
There is a definition of the way that system operates and it is based on four standards. All of them are covering a different aspect of the aviation quality and they are the main pillars of the industry to ensure that it has one of the best safety records of any type of mass transport.
- FAA Advisory Circular AC 120-59A -Air Carrier Internal Audit Programs.
Advisory Circular 120-59A provided by the Federal Aviation Administration provides the groundwork of commercial air carrier internal quality audits. This standard mandates carriers to develop their own systematic audit mechanisms, which in turn should regularly review the adherence to FAA regulations as well as the approved procedures of the carrier itself, instead of waiting to have the regulators point out the issues. In addition, accurate documentation and record-keeping are absolutely required since they provide proof of compliance and security. Regular safety inspections and audits are also carried out by aviation companies to evaluate their adherence and to rectify any weaknesses before such weaknesses lead to bigger problems.
According to AC 120-59A, a successful internal audit program should be independent, which presupposes that the audit team should not report to the department under assessment. This is an essential independence, which guards against the clashes of interest occasioned by having a department rate itself. Results of the audits should be reported, remedial measures should be monitored and the management should show that the gaps that have been found are indeed being fixed and not merely noted.
The scope of this standard is what makes it important. It is not only related to the flight operations but also to the maintenance, ground handling, dispatch, crew training and any other operation that has contact to the airworthiness or operational safety. The airlines that are subject to Part 121 of the Federal Aviation Regulations are supposed to have audit programs that would highlight systemic problems before they turn out to be incidents. The carriers that allow such programs to become formalities (audits being performed and results never having any corrective actions) have been recurrently reported in the post-accident investigations as institutions in which issues were identified to exist but never being corrected.
- Part-145 of the EASA maintenance organization approvals.
Parts 145 regulation of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency regulates the certification and supervision of the maintenance repair and overhaul (MRO) organizations. Any entity that conducts maintenance of aircraft registered in EASA member states, or on aircraft flown by EASA-regulated carriers, must be eligible to have a Part-145 approval – and to acquire and retain that approval, it is necessary to satisfy a very detailed set of quality criteria.
Part-145 centers on the need to have a Quality Management System (QMS) that tracks the adherence to maintenance processes, nonconformancies and promote corrective measures. Organizations approved should appoint an Accountable Manager directly responsible in safety and compliance, and have nominated post-holders responsible in maintenance, quality, and human factors.
Part-145 also addresses the fact that organizations must have calibrated tooling, should use approved technical data and that technicians should be licensed and recurrent-trained on the particular types and systems they maintain on particular aircraft. More importantly, it requires that maintenance records should be kept a specified amount of time, in some cases three years in the case of routine maintenance, and the life of the aircraft in others, in order that any future investigation can know exactly what was performed, by whom, and when.
The standard has international recognition. Part-145 approval is recognized by many non-EASA countries as a perfect match to their national maintenance standards, and thus large MRO facilities in Asian, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries are actively seeking and maintaining both EASA and local certifications.
- AS9100 Quality Management Systems Aviation, Space, and Defense.
The aerospace-based extension of ISO 9001 is known as AS9100, which has been created by International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG). Where ISO 9001 gives a broad guideline to quality management in any industry, AS9100 layers do not present aviation-specific demands, such as product safety, configuration management, first article inspection, and prevention of counterfeit parts, which are risks that are of unique significance in aerospace manufacturing.
The test is mainly used on aircraft component, system and assembly manufacturers. The customers of a supplier of avionics, structural components, landing gear, or engines to commercial or defence applications often insist that their supplier be certified by AS9100 through third party auditing by one of the accredited certification bodies.
Among the greatest contributions made by the AS9100 is that it offers risk-based thinking in the whole supply chain. Manufacturers should determine in which areas the quality failures would be the most safety critical and impose disproportionate strict controls on the processes. This is more applicable in the current aviation industry where mega manufacturers such as Boeing and Airbus have hundreds of tier-1 and tier-2 suppliers each of whom has to perform at a high level in terms of quality. The failure or lapses in the AS9100 certification has resulted in supplier disqualifications and termination of contracts in several large-scale aerospace programs. You can easily book a reputable private plane that operate in a safe and high service standards, ensuring full satisfaction to the passengers. The reputation of an airline is developed through years of good service delivery, and this is what most corporations are seeking.
- ICAO Annex 6 -Operation of Aircraft and Safety Management Systems.
Annex 6 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation by the International Civil Aviation Organization provides the international standards of aircraft operation, such as the need to have a Safety Management System (SMS) in place by the operators. An SMS in Annex 6 is not a safety checklist, it is a formal and data-driven model by which an organization will list hazards, determine risk, apply mitigations, and gauge their efficiency overtime.
The framework that was developed by ICAO covers four elements of SMS, namely, safety policy and objectives, safety risk management, safety assurance, and safety promotion. All the components come with documented processes, duties and quantifiable deliverables. Operators should have a database of safety that stores the hazard reports, incident data, and audit findings all these transfer to recurrent risk assessment.
The difference between the SMS and less sophisticated methods of compliance lies in its active direction. Conventional quality and safety initiatives are focused on researching on what has gone awry following an incident. The operational SMS is created to detect what may fail in advance of failure through leading indicators such as near-miss reporting, trends of maintenance errors and fatigue data. The members of ICAO are under obligation to enforce the use of SMS by their commercial operators and the standard has been widely adopted by the airlines, MROs, airports, and air navigation service providers, around the world since the requirement was codified in 2009.
The reason why these four standards are effective.
All these standards cover a failure mode. AC 120-59A development operational drift and becomes systemic. Part-145 is the quality and traceability of maintenance. AS9100 manages the risk of manufacturing in the supply chain. Annex 6 SMS establishes the capacity of the organization to deal with the hazards beforehand and not only respond to them.
It is not by chance that aviation has a solid safety track record – the fatality rates of commercial jet aviation decreased over 95 percent during the last 50 years. It is the result of overlaying, intersecting quality frameworks which give fewer points of leakage of mistakes which get through unnoticed.
