Mr. Diarmuid Ó Conghaile:

Yes. The first point we should emphasise is that aviation is an extremely regulated activity, necessarily and rightly so, and it is a very safe activity. I have a statistic with me that I was discussing with the Chair earlier. In 2018, before the pandemic hit, 4.3 billion passengers travelled globally on 46 million flights. In terms of fatal accidents per 1 million flights, in 1992, it was 0.95; in 2016, it was 0.2. Therefore, there has been a huge improvement in safety performance across the industry as connectivity and the number of journeys have increased.

On the question of how we regulate, as a regulator we have 12,000 standards and recommended practices from the ICAO. We have thousands of pages of European Union Aviation Safety Agency regulation. The EASA regulation transposes the ICAO regulation, but it goes beyond that. It also gives us acceptable means of compliance. It sets out the law and how operators or licence holders can comply with the law. Further, it provides additional guidance material. That is done at European level and it is standard across Europe. For example, if I am an airline, a pilot, an engineer or a maintenance organisation, I can go on to the EASA website, or link into it through the IAA website, and see exactly the structure of regulatory oversight and what I have to comply with. As the IAA, we audit against those compliance requirements. We do thousands of audits each year, and we audit on the basis of compliance checklists. For example, if there are 100 requirements in the regulation, we will say that we are going to audit against every single one of them. We may randomly pull out records relating to a particular area.

Aviation is a very safe industry that is comprehensively regulated. What the AAIU report and the tragic accident of R116 tell us is that in the area of SAR, there are important improvements that we can make. We are committed to making those improvements. To give one example, SAR was previously usually conducted by the State in different jurisdictions. It was outside the remit of the ICAO and the EASA. Therefore, the regulation of SAR is less developed than civil aviation generally.