Would best practice work?
 

An imaginative view; advice to EASA (and FAA, etc). 17 June

• The industry you are regulating is growing at a rate you cannot deal with using existing methods. You do not have the resources and you will not get them.
  
• Technology is advancing at a rate you cannot keep up with using current regulatory philosophies...
  
• ...so you can't do things the way you do now. You will have to evolve constantly to keep up with what technology can do.
  
• Working with industry has always been a part of how regulators operate. In future, maybe that should be all you do.
  
• Ops regulation in the future could be a system for identifying best practice and spreading the word. That would ensure safety evolved in step with capability.
  
• It is more effective, and far cheaper to persuade companies that their interest lies in exceeding compliance standards than to threaten them with sanctions if they don't comply.
  
• BUT - the ultimate regulatory sanction is national law. If recognised industry best practice were used to define future required standards, the ultimate sanction for corporate failure to achieve defined standards would be the application of criminal law (where negligence or willful non-compliance is involved).

Would best practice work?

Para last but one. Says who? I don't believe that is a valid assertion at all, let alone an appropriate one.

Para last. What this is proposing is "regulation" by lawyers sucking the industry dry in an endless legal morass to define best practices?

a) It’s the author’s view; but there could be many similar depending on operational safety culture, an operator’s balance of safety vs economics, and the ‘value’ placed on safety re corporate image.

b) Not necessarily so. National law is currently the highest level. The use of best practice as a measure might help level the playing field for ‘just culture’ and to close the gap between the legal and aviation views of error.

Anyway the question was if best practice will work – irrespective of the benefits of bettering minimum standards of ‘compliance’ or the slow progress of legal change.

The ‘advice’ has some interesting points.
In many ways the manufacturers already work together and with the regulators; there is a common interest in long-term safety. Perhaps less so for operators where short-term commercial interests tend to dominate.

I doubt that operational regulation would work based on best practice. Who decides what is best, and is ‘best’ good enough. Alternatively, nor may the current regulatory system, which increasingly fences-in operators / pilots, achieve the necessary safety improvements in a time scale to match the evolving operational environment.
Thus the industry requires change, but do the regulators and operators have sufficient time and resource to effect a meaningful change while they are either busy legalising existing regulation within Europe or seeking workarounds to the operational rules. So a cynical view might conclude that ‘best practice’ is a reasonable compromise and has chance of succeeding at least as good as the current system.

Of interest the UK CAA is promoting the identification and sharing of ‘best practice’ in their Strategy for Human Factors.