SAFA Skysailor Magazine

28 SKY SAILOR September | October 2022 Coming Changes – Civil Aviation Safety Regulations Parts 149 and 103 (and 91) by Iain Clarke – SAFA Safety Management Officer Lately you have been receiving some emails about consultations running through our Member Consultation System (MCS). For those of you that have taken the time to read and understand the contents and provide your thoughts, we thank you. There will be more to come in the future, and no doubt several of you are wondering what these are all about. The answer is that I and Victorian Affiliate Director, Mark Pike, are working pretty much exclusively on our application to gain certi- fication as an Approved Self-Administering Organisation (ASAO) under CA SR Part 149. Your views are contributing to the work we are doing to get us over that line. Part 149? What’s that and why do we need to change? The regulations under which we are able to fly our aircraft are undergoing significant change and now fall under the Civil Aviation Safety Regulation structure (see Figure 1). Currently, we operate under the Civil Aviation Regulations, with exemptions provided in the Civil Aviation Orders: CAOs 95.8, 95.10 and 95.32. This structure is being replaced and has a flow-on effect to all aviation groups of which SAFA is one. In December last year, the new CASR Part 91 regulations came into force. These specify the General Operating and Flight Rules for aircraft. You can see where Part 91 sits in the framework – right in the middle. If you look at the 10 o’clock position of 91 , you will see 149 Sport with 103 and 105 hanging off it – these are the Parts that will apply to our aircraft and operations. Part 149 specifies the rules governing ASAOs – how the organisation carries out the functions of administering its sport aviation activities. Part 103 contains some operations and flight rules governing the operations of our sport aviation aircraft. Part 105 describes the rules governing parachuting from aircraft. In summary, we have Part 91 governing everyone’s operations, but some bits of this don’t apply to Part 103 aircraft; we have Part 103 governing our aircraft and operations, and then we have our own CASA-approved SAFA rules specific to us, by us – the ‘old’ Operations Manual. Overarching SAFA and other Sport Aviation Bodies (SABs) is Part 149 – the rules for our organisation’s administra- tion of ‘approved functions’. Clear as crystal. Now to muddy the waters, a little… While the Parts give the regulations, the Manuals of Standards give the detail as to how the regulations are to be implemented. Both are legal instruments. We have been authoring with the understanding that there is a signif- icant hole in our understanding of the new regulations – there is no Manual of Standards yet for Part 103. We have the Manual of Stan- dards for Part 149, but not the nuts and bolts for 103. Let’s come back to that in a bit.