From Director of Aviation and Chief Executive of the Civil Aviation Authority, Keith Manch.
Recently the Authority has been focussed on improving our investigative function to reflect a consistent, fair, and transparent approach across the aviation industry.
This follows an independent review that I commissioned in 2023 by Mike Heron KC which reviewed our investigative function.
After outlining my expectations, the Authority has been making some internal changes to its processes, policies, and procedures to better reflect how we need to operate as a modern regulator. This has included some changes to how some of our internal roles and teams are structured.
Review of CAA’s Investigation and Enforcement Function [PDF 699 KB]
The aim has been to strengthen internal collaboration during an investigation, making better use of external experts to support investigations, and aligning the investigation function closer to our intelligence and education functions.
Our role and dedication to safety outcomes remains the same, and reporting obligations haven’t changed either. Investigations will still produce safety learnings and we’ll continue to focus on influencing safe behaviour.
This work will prepare the Authority for the new Civil Aviation Act coming into force April 2025. The changes are designed to ensure the Authority can gather all the facts to help us make informed decisions when events occur. This includes determining a right outcome to address risk and change behaviour.
There are many options for a modern regulator to do this, such as taking no further action, education, producing guidance, policy changes, or engaging with the sector through safety campaigns. It may also require enforcement action where appropriate, and these decisions aren’t always straightforward.
Our next steps involve supporting our people while we embed internal changes and make sure our processes and procedures reflect this new way of working. We’ll continue engaging with the aviation sector. This will include ensuring clarity over the new legislation, and how that legislation protects the use of information. Part of this will be clarifying how Just Culture applies and interacts with decision making and within participant organisations. This is timely with consideration of the information protection provisions included in the Civil Aviation Act 2023.
More information about the recent changes can be found in the initial report:
Independent review - August 2023 [PDF 1.7 MB]
027 763 0000 | media@caa.govt.nz
