Description

In the United Kingdom, the safety regulation of UK civil aviation is the responsibility of the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s Safety Regulation Group (SRG). The CAA's responsibility is therefore to provide the regulatory framework within which the industry must work and thereafter to monitor performance to be satisfied that required standards are set and maintained.

Accordingly, the CAA has established a Mandatory Occurrence Reporting Scheme (MORS) to complement normal industry procedures, mechanisms and systems. Under this scheme, all safety hazards or potential hazards involving UK registered aircraft or aircraft in UK airspace are required to be reported to SRG's Safety Investigation and Data Department.

MORS

The objective of the MOR Scheme is to contribute to the improvement of air safety by ensuring that relevant information on safety is reported, collected, stored, protected and disseminated. The sole objective of occurrence reporting is the prevention of accidents and incidents and not to attribute blame or liability. By monitoring the safety performance of the aviation system, SRG can assess whether the safety risks are being properly controlled by the industry and public and can identify areas where safety may need to be improved.

The SRG also makes use of other sources of information which allow it to assess risk for the whole aviation system. These can be world-wide accident and serious incident reports, information from the UK operational flight data monitoring programmes and data from special safety studies, all supported by comprehensive operational data.

An explanation of the MORS is given in the CAA publication CAA Paper 382, which can be downloaded from the CAA website (see ‘Further Reading”).

CAA Aviation Safety Review

As a result, CAA SRG is able to periodically publish a review of civil aviation safety performance in the UK, European Union and worldwide. The most recent review was published in November 2008 as CAA Paper 780, which can be downloaded from the UK CAA website (see “Further Reading”).

The objective of the safety review is to bring together aviation safety related information into a single source document to be used by the aviation community for statistical reference. Specifically, the document contains comprehensive statistics and analysis relating to (inter alia) :

• Worldwide Literature Review
• Worldwide Aviation Safety
• Aviation Safety in the European Union
• Safety of UK Public Transport Worldwide
• Safety of UK Non-public Transport Worldwide
• Safety of UK Airspace and Aerodromes

Further Reading

UK CAA

• CAP 382 - The Mandatory Occurrence Reporting Scheme
• CAP 3035 - Aviation Safety Review 2023
• Safety Regulation Group's website

UK AAIB

• AAIB Annual Safety Review 2023