on the adoption of the 2016-2020 Rulemaking Programme
In 2014, the European Aviation Safety Agency underwent a major organisational change. Two key characteristics of this change were:
- the dissolution of the Rulemaking Directorate and the transfer of rules development activities to the Certification Directorate and the newly created Flight Standards Directorate; and
- the assignment of all programming activities to the newly created Strategy and Safety Management Directorate.
The expected benefits of these two changes are:
- the integration of the rulemaking activities with other activities (certification, standardisation and organisation approvals) in the same field and the creation of poles of technical competences per department in each directorate; and
- the adoption of a top-down, fully consistent and coherent approach to the programming of the Agency key activities.
This issue of the Rulemaking Programme already takes advantage of the latter. Rulemaking tasks are not presented any more as a list of tasks per technical domain; instead, they are presented per main driver (safety; environment; efficiency/proportionality; level playing field) and main priority action areas (e.g. all tasks related to the issue of loss of control in flight (LOC- I)). Furthermore, they are presented in the context of other related Agency activities. In particular, a link to related European Plan for Aviation Safety (EPAS) and European Strategic Safety Initiative (ESSI)1 safety promotion actions is established.
Through this, we aim to provide the Agency’s stakeholders with a comprehensive and coherent vision of what the Agency intends to do in the coming years in order to improve safety or the environmental performance of the aviation sector (safety/environment driver), to support fair competition and free movement of persons and services (level playing field driver), and to support business, technological development and competitiveness (efficiency/proportionality driver).