CASA’s National Surveillance Selection Process (NSSP) came into effect on 1 July 2018.

A key element of the National Oversight Plan, the NSSP is a CASA-wide, annual schedule based on a standardised approach to prioritising, classifying and scheduling authorisation holders for surveillance.

The NSSP incorporates a systematic approach to classifying and ranking authorisation holders based on a combination of centralised data and local knowledge.

The NSSP allows CASA to apply a significant national focus to surveillance. It also provides some operational flexibility to accommodate changing priorities or safety concerns, or to gain efficiencies by combining like activities for multiple operators in a single location.

Similarly, if an authorisation holder is scheduled for three surveillance events in a year it might make sense to do them all at once. Alternatively, if there is an operational rationale, surveillance might be spread out so that more regular contact can be maintained over each 12-month period. The NSSP has the flexibility to allow either approach.

The NSSP schedule will help CASA to maintain a more integrated oversight picture, and to better monitor where effort is focused and ensure that resources are directed to where they are needed most. This will become a cyclic process whereby what is observed each year will inform and continuously improve how surveillance is approached in the following year.

Scheduled surveillance is just one of the ways CASA interacts with authorisation holders and gains a holistic picture of their operations. In changing the way in which CASA approaches oversight, we are also looking at the history and data obtained when providing regulatory services.

The CASA Aviation Safety Committee meets monthly and reviews information from sources such as scheduled surveillance, sector risk profiles, regulatory services information, accident/incident trend data and reports on significant accidents, in order to build an aviation safety view of a given aviation sector, sub-sector or specific organisation.

The committee analyses the information to identify any emerging safety risks and subsequently determines whether there is a need to conduct a national, sector-focused campaign of surveillance activity or an organisation-specific surveillance activity in addition to the ongoing NSSP scheduled surveillance.