One of the toughest jobs connected with aviation safety is trying to convince operators that being safe today has little bearing on being safe tomorrow if continuous attention is not paid. This task gets even more difficult during periods of economic hardship.
This caveat is the same for regulators as it is for operators, but the consequences of a regulator’s slipping focus are less obvious, reflected mostly in a secondary way when the state of an operator’s compliance becomes noticeably lacking, which means that not only has the regulator failed to maintain standards, but the operator as well, an evil brew of circumstances.
So, when the European Union’s (EU’s) Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft (SAFA), that famous ramp inspection program, started to see German air carriers showing an increasing number of findings per inspection, the EU Air Safety Committee started a formal consultation with the German regulator, Luftfahrtbundesamt (LBA), as was reported in the April 2…
