Running an aviation organization requires not only a perfect understanding of the flight business in general, but also a great awareness of ongoing regulations. Throughout the years, we have been extending Leon’s functionality to help our community meet all the requirements imposed by local authorities and it shows. The number of operators passing audits flawlessly due to having Leon integrated with their internal procedures rises week after week.
In this article we will focus only on a very brief fragment of existing regulations, more precisely EASA Air Operations in Revision 14. As the source material is extremely extensive, the main point is to catch a glimpse of Leon’s versatility in terms of supporting the compliance management. As Leon provides solutions to the aviation business worldwide, it is more than expected to see various implementations of mentioned regulations, adapted into a legal framework taken into account by each CAA.
Regulations related to air operations, which are probably the most vital to our readers, can be found in the Part-ORO, Part-CAT and Part-NCC section of Air Ops, as they refer to such aspects of operations as facility, personnel and documentation requirements, operator’s way of handling contracted activities, documentation management and record keeping, as well as team’s responsibilities and more.
As it has been specified in the section ORO.GEN.220 Record-keeping of Air Ops, „the operator shall establish a system of record-keeping that allows adequate storage and reliable traceability of all activities developed (…) The format of the records shall be specified in the operator’s procedures. (…) When hardware or software changes take place, special care should be taken that all necessary data continues to be accessible at least through the full period specified in the relevant subpart. In the absence of such indication, all records should be kept for a minimum period of 5 years.”
This means that your management system should not only provide an easy access to the latest relevant audit data, but also to the history of operational changes introduced over the time in your organization. Fortunately, Leon allows that for a variety of data, including flight data, endorsements, fleet documents and many other operations conducted daily, such as roster changes for instance. As for keeping the data, at Leon we keep the operator’s records for a period of time adequate to regulations that can meet even the longest timespan of 5 years, mentioned in the available rulebook.
Staying compliant with the ongoing regulations requires that your team of professionals has all the necessary qualifications for adequate positions, but also that those qualifications can be easily tracked. According to the section ORO.GEN.210, „(c) the operator shall have sufficient qualified personnel for the planned tasks and activities to be performed in accordance with the applicable requirements.” and „shall maintain appropriate experience, qualification and training records to show compliance with point (c)”.
In Leon, tracking such data is streamlined via Endorsements, consisting of detailed information (such as expiry dates, scans of documents, among all) on endorsements, airport recency and online familiarization for each crew member. Tracking of endorsements for the crew is also possible via Leon mobile application.
An efficient access to the relevant documentation by the team is another notable EASA regulation. Each operator „shall be capable of distributing operational instructions and other information without delay” (ORO.AOC.150). Such process can be easily set up in the Privileges section of Leon, by determining a specific group of recipients and attaching the given documentation in the Manuals tab.
Again, the distribution of documentation works even better, if we consider that since recently it is also possible to provide your crew with the required documents available through the section Manuals in the Leon App.
When addressing FTLs, there is a number of EASA regulations that cover this aspect of operations, including such sections of Air Ops as ORO.FTL.110 (Operator responsibilities – „an operator shall ensure that flight duty periods are planned in a way that enables crew members to remain sufficiently free from fatigue (…)”), ORO.FTL.115 (Crew member responsibilities – „The crew member shall comply with all flight and duty time limitations (FTL) and rest requirements applicable to their activities”), or ORO.FTL.125 (Flight time specification schemes – „Operators shall establish, implement and maintain flight time specification schemes that are appropriate for the type(s) of operation performed (…)”).
In order to meet those requirements, not only we have developed a second-to-none FTL engine and have worked diligently on our crew management module (Crew Panel), our team has also some great experience in implementing different FTL schemes for different AOCs. In order to grasp the complexity of this process, don’t forget to take a peek at another article on the subject, we have written some time ago.
As an operator should “maintain for a period of 24 months individual records for each crew member” (ORO.FTL.245 - Records of home base, flight times, duty and rest periods), the good news is that such data would still be kept in Leon, being available for reference when needed, even if an individual Leon account is shut down.
The current version of EASA Air Ops regulations in Revision 14 can be found at EASA website www.easa.europa.eu.
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