Thursday, June 27, 2013
1.14 (PC Hoofthuis)
The Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft (SAFA) Directive is a tool for enhancing civil-aviation safety. Under the SAFA Directive, the civil aviation authorities of the SAFA Participating States need to carry out ramp inspections on third-country aircraft suspected of non-compliance with international safety standards. When it comes to studying the inter-linkages between the different phases in the implementation process and the relationships of the actors involved in this regard, SAFA is interesting for several reasons. First of all, the SAFA Directive served to anchor non-binding rules on the execution of ramp inspections that had been introduced under the previously-existent, voluntary SAFA programme. The proper implementation of such rules requires highly-specific technical knowledge and expertise on the part of inspectors. Both issues raise questions as to the relationship between national ministries (and transposing legislation) on the one hand, and the civil aviation authorities (and the way in which inspections are carried out in practice) on the other hand. Secondly, SAFA is an area in which the Commission has political leadership but the European Aviation Safety Agency exerts great influence when it comes to how ramp inspections are carried out in practice. It does so by inspecting the civil aviation authorities and by providing guidance to them. Just as is the case for the relationship between national ministries and aviation authorities, these factors question the validity of the hierarchal clearance point model for explaining relations between the Commission and the Agency. This paper aims to shed light on these issues on the basis of, mainly, in-depth interviews with Commission and EASA officials and with officials of the national ministries and civil aviation authorities of the following four member states: the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
