Maintaining Change

“In late 2005, the decision was taken by the then CEO of CASA [Bruce Byron] that CASA would try regulatory reform from a slightly different perspective. The direction that we were given was to develop a CASR Part 145 regulation that was internationally recognisable and compliant with the International Civil Aviation Organization [ICAO] requirements as far as possible,” said Ward.
Meeting ICAO requirements meant harmonising with an internationally recognised system, which saw EASA’s similar Part 145 regulation adopted by CASA as the basis for CASR Part 145.

Between now and June 2013, approximately 200 Maintenance and Repair Organisations (MROs) are expected to transition from the existing CAR 30 regulation and adopt CASR Part 145, which was formally rolled out alongside its three sister regulations on June 27 this year.

“We were able to introduce safety management systems to meet the ICAO requirements, and we were also able to introduce the requirement for human factors training and the management of human performance within the maintenance environment. And these are the big changes between our existing approval regime for maintenance organisations and the new regime,” Ward said of the differences between CAR 30 and CASR Part 145.

“We have in the order of about 700 to 750 organisations that are involved in the maintenance of aircraft in Australia today. It’s [CASR Part 145] a smaller subset of that that are involved [in RPT operations], so we’ve taken a very measured approach in the implementation of this legislation…It’s not necessarily a direct one to one relationship [either], because as you can appreciate, for every operator, they may elect to use multiple maintenance providers,” he added.

“The next steps in the process from 2013 onwards are to look at refinements to the legislation and then that would involve more industry consultation to look at the opportunities to apply the legislation outside of the RPT environment.”

While Ward argues that CASA has attempted to create “a regulatory environment that is comparable and as far as possible, internationally harmonised”, the move to CASR Part 145 has raised concerns from the Aviation Maintenance Repair and Overhaul Business Association (AMROBA), who believe the new regulations significantly differ in terminology from EASA Part 145 and will be too costly to implement for smaller MRO businesses.

“We’ve supported the EASA 145 adoption to meet the big maintenance organisations supporting aircraft maintenance for the airline system… However, we do have some problems with the way that it’s been implemented in this country because of the changing of terminology mainly to meet the criminal law requirements,” AMROBA executive director Ken Cannane told Australian Aviation.

“This has put additional administrative costs above and beyond [smaller MROs], and has some different philosophies built into it than what is in EASA 145,” he added.

Cannane warns that approximately 70 “smaller component maintenance shops” have already decided not to transition to CASR Part 145 from CAR 30, due to the perceivably high administrative costs of between $20,000 and $100,000 for doing so.

“We’re concerned that we’re going to end up, especially in component shops, with a two-level administration for organisations with no change to the actual work they do. The qualifications, the people who do the work today don’t change. The data and the equipment and everything they use doesn’t change…Yet companies who opt to go into this new system will be totally recognised by CASA and given all sorts of rights. The rest of them will become fairly redundant and will only be able to concentrate in the non-RPT field,” Cannane explained.

“As a very experienced member of ours said to me …these new rules have got such high complexity in them, they were supposed to have been written in plain English that in some aspects, it will take a person with a legal background to understand what it’s actually trying to say,” he asserted.

As for a solution to these shortfalls, AMROBA is continuing to consult with CASA through an established project team, which although is aimed at reviewing the future of general aviation, does again raise the impact of CASR Part 145 on smaller MROs who may also cater for RPT operations in their line of work.

“The one size fits all philosophy, which was the original intention in Europe, has been recognised by the Europeans that it just won’t work, and therefore they’re [CASA] rethinking their whole approach to general aviation,” Cannane said of CASR Part 145.

“The one benefit I suppose is the fact that it is CASA’s responsibility to amend the manual of standards if they find that it does not achieve the same result as what the EASA rules are doing.”
That itself is an area which Ward says CASA is open to changing, with a ‘standards development process’ to assess the impact of CASR Part 145 and its accompanying suite of maintenance regulations on the industry. This includes the publication of a “regulatory impact statement”, designed to identify changes that such regulations bring about to MRO businesses.

“The legislation is as far as possible harmonised with the European legislation on which it’s modelled. There are some areas of difference, and these are mainly to address areas where ICAO has requirements that aren’t currently addressed in the European legislation, and the safety management system is a great example of that,” Ward said.

“CASA has the ability to respond to change. And again, this is one of the benefits of the new legislative environment that we have moved to. The structure of the legislation is designed to reflect contemporary thinking on safety. And the legislation is designed to express the safety outcome that is required…We’ve tried as far as we possibly can to avoid divergence between the Australia and the European regulatory environment for that very reason.”

One MRO provider who is benefitting from the regulatory change is Hawker Pacific subsidiary, Hawker Pacific Airline Support Services (HPASS) in Cairns, which became the first Australian MRO to be accredited with CASR Part 145 on August 24. Having already been accredited to EASA Part 145 since 2005, HPASS now has a simliar Australian standard to meet its RPT operations with the introduction of CASR Part 145.

“We were using EASA as our as baseline standard and we have for some years applied those principles into our existing CASA CAR 30 certificate activities…I think in our region, there’s no doubt that the EASA rule suite is generally accepted as the standard,” Hawker Pacific vice president of Quality and Systems, Jim Pilkington said.

“The requirement for a functioning safety management systems for CASR Part 145 certification has been used to advantage in Hawker by integrating quality, aviation safety, OH&S, security and environment management into the one system and data-base,” he added.

Hawker Pacific senior vice president, Australian and New Zealand operations, Doug Park was also quick to point out the advantages of CASR Part 145 to the company in being able to appeal to its existing customer base.

“Being able to conform to the latest and highest standards will certainly appeal to quality operators, there’s no doubt about that,” Park said.

“But in addition, it probably will take another period of time for a further harmonisation of CASR Part 145 to arrive at a position of auto acceptance in other 145 airworthiness environments,” added Hawker Pacific senior vice president, Australian and New Zealand operations, Doug Park.

“One that happens, technically speaking, we could potentially drop our EASA 145 and that will save a considerable amount of money…Certainly, we have a very strong argument that once CASR Part 145 is accepted by the other 145 organisations, it’s going to make Hawker more of a global organisation in terms of sourcing MRO work from the region,” Park added.

While lowering the costs of compliance and streamlining with EASA-based regulations are the primary advantages for HPASS’s adoption of CASR Part 145, Pilkington saw the potential for those procedural lessons to be applied to other Hawker Pacific operations in line with their continual improvement policy.

“We are now transitioning our Australian Avionics certificate and we will be using what we’ve learnt from our HPASS certificate to document the procedures for that process. We will at the same time be looking at amending the HPASS documented procedures as we learn and institute them in concert with CASA,” he said.

Yet despite the mixed reaction from industry players to CASR Part 145, CASA remains confident that smaller maintenance organisations will be able to follow the lead of larger MROs like HPASS in adopting the new regulations, even if it means taking a different procedural approach to achieving the same standard.

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, they are still all reading the same safety outcomes but using different means of achieving them…It is flexible in that sense, in that the means of compliance can grow as industry thinks of more innovative ways to manage their businesses,” Ward concluded.