The Hindu Business Line : IATA bid to improve airline safety by cutting audit costs

INSPIRED by the International Civil Aviation Organisation's (ICAO) safety oversight activities, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has launched a programme to improve airline safety while reducing the cost of audits for its members.

According to an article published in ICAO Journal, the audit initiative involves all the 275 member airlines of IATA. The idea behind the initiative is to arrive at a global, harmonised and consistent programme for the operational safety auditing of airlines. The exercise is also intended to standardise, harmonise and rationalise the growing number of redundant airline audits with a view to improving operational safety and saving airlines' money.

IATA's Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) Programme is an internationally-accepted and recognised evaluation system designed to assess the operational management and control systems of airlines. Its internationally-recognised quality audit principles is designed in a such a way that audits are conducted in a standardised and consistent manner. The IOSA Standards Manual is a source document for IOSA standards and recommended practices and associated guiding material.

In fact, the manual provides operational standards for an airline in various areas - corporate organisation and management, flight operations, operational control and flight despatch, aircraft engineering and maintenance cabin operations, aircraft ground handling, cargo operations and ground safety.

With more and more airlines undertaking audits of other carriers, either to meet regulatory requirements or for their commercial interests, the attractiveness of a common auditing system has greatly increased. A typical IOSA programme involves six auditors on site for a period of five days.

While each airline must make arrangements with an audit organisation to provide the service, IATA's commitment to its membership is to provide a range of audit organisations with both global and regional coverage. Each airline is then able to choose the organisation it wants, based on the financial criteria or otherwise it establishes.

In a resolution at IATA's annual general meeting last year, IATA members committed to seek an IOSA audit by 2006. While the timetable is subject to review by the IATA Board, fundamentally it means that the current members must have completed their IOSA audit, or well be on their way of achieving their first audit, by the beginning of 2006.