There are some useful discussion platforms around that help the Flight Procedure community to exchange problems, ideas etc. The ANI operates one of these platforms. There are also others. One thing caught my attention and I decided to comment on it: There seem to be organizations, which believe that they can have Flight Procedure Designers perform their job without a formal training. They read through PANS-OPS, of course they don't get certain things, especially not the rationales behind the criteria and then think they can fill the gap posting questions on a forum.
States should be aware of the following: PANS documents are criteria and have a certain status for Contracting States. That means if a State does not comply with certain paragraphs in PANS, they do NOT have to notify ICAO (like necessary for non-compliance with Annexes) but they MUST publish it in their State AIP (Annex 15 requirement). There is a Quality Assurance chapter in PANS-OPS that says amongst other things:
Each State shall ensure that Designers achieve and maintain the required competency level though training and OJT. Training for Designers should at least include initial training and recurrent training at periodic intervals (you can check the exact text yourself). Initial training according to doc. 9906 is a basic PANS-OPS course.
So it follows that States that think they can save costs by not sending their staff to courses actually deviate from PANS-OPS. Therefore they should publish that in the State AIP. Imagine a statement in the GEN section of the AIP: "Deviations from PANS-OPS ICAO doc. 8168: Flight Procedure Designers not formally trained". I am sure, this would be much appreciated...
The bad news for such Organizations: We (ICAO IFPP) are now also establishing requirements at Annex level that will regulate how Flight Procedure Design Service and its oversight must be established. That is, if they continue to non-comply they even have to notify ICAO about it :-)
This is the diary and newspost of the Air Navigation Institute in Switzerland. It contains news about the Institute's activities but also information on other Instrument Flight Procedure Design and Aviation related topics. And it's Beat Zimmermann's platform to distract from daily business once in a while.
2 comments:
Thanks Beat for this outstanding post.
I do believe if a pilot or an air traffic controller must have their licenses I think it is time for ICAO to establish a license if somebody wants to work as a Procedure Designer. States must be held responsible for this critical issue regarding safety.
Establishing a license scheme is not ICAO's responsibility for the time being. We have created the QA chapter in PANS-OPS some years ago, that already puts States in a position to establish a certain quality standard. Then we have released doc. 9906 vol. 2 that provides guidance on training programs The isea is now to give the community time to apply that. As I have written quite a lot of stuff in that manual, the ANI has applied it straight away. ENAC and Singapore I am not sure to be honest.
As a next step we will have Annex material on how to establish and oversee a procedure design service.
States can always implement a license scheme based on the available material, there is no need for ICAO to regulate that. Many States now actually do have such a scheme.
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