Many airlines have had to slow or stop operations altogether due to COVID-19. But the need for airline audit preparedness continues as airlines are still held to regulatory standards.
If you’ve been in aviation for any length of time, you know that collecting compliance is ongoing, and that proving compliance through a regulatory audit is additional work on top of everything else. And when your airline is audited, responding to the request is often a complicated process fraught with struggle and stress – but it doesn’t have to be if you’re always audit-ready. When preparing for an aviation audit is automated and simply the results of routine work, you can produce the necessary documentation to pass an audit instantly and worry-free.
But if this doesn’t quite sound like your airline, here are three signs that your aviation audits could be easier.
It’s not uncommon for an airline to spend months manually collecting compliance data for a regulatory audit – and during that time, their normal duties are put off until the audit is complete. Aviation audits can consume the time of many resources and sometimes entire departments. However, if standards and regulations have been traced all along, airlines can simply run a report showing where regulations are addressed in their documentation.
Ensuring pilots and flight attendants acknowledge the information they need to operate safely and efficiently is crucial, but it’s not always easy. Oftentimes, a pilot has to wait at the gate to download entire PDF manuals instead of just the pieces of new information, and there’s no way to see updates and sign-off on them in one place. And compliance is often manually tracked. But if pilots and flight attendants receive revision highlights detailing the changes, and compliance is automatically tracked with digital sign off, you have all the proof you need with no extra work.
When an auditor performs a spot check to determine whether a flight crew has the most up-to-date information, crew members often struggle to find the information. Many airlines distribute their documents in PDFs, and even when crews are trained on where to find each piece of data, scrolling through them is slow, and searching the PDF could return dozens (or even hundreds) of irrelevant results. And if the crew member doesn’t remember where the data is, they might not be able to find it at all, often resulting in a fine for your airline. One way to make data faster and easier to find is by tagging content. This allows crews to filter and search to quickly find the right information any time they need it – which also enables them to manage situations (and not the manual) they face during the course of their job, in addition to easily satisfying auditor requests.
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