Flight Operations

**Date**:5 Mar 2025

**Location**: Gatwick, GB

**Company**:Civil Aviation Authority

**Salary**: Up to £57,000

**Contract Type**:Permanent - Full time

**Location**:Gatwick - Hybrid

**Travel**:Travel is required within this role, largely nationally with some travel to Europe and potentially worldwide.

**Visa Restrictions**:This position does not offer visa sponsorship.

We are the UK's aviation and aerospace regulator and recognised as a world leader in its field. Our activities are diverse, enabling the aviation industry to meet the highest safety standards, and we pride ourselves on our ability to adapt to the constantly evolving aviation environment.

**The Role**

To ensure that the evaluation, certification, approval and continuing compliance of pilot flight training provided by UK-certified training organisations is carried out in compliance with applicable aviation regulations and best practices to provide safe and compliant training and testing for students and holders of UK pilot licences.

**Core Accountabilities**
- Holding Accountable Managers (or Responsible Representatives) and other key position holders to account for managing safety within their training organisations.
- Ensuring safe and compliant pilot training is delivered by training organisations’ staff and contractors.
- Influencing training organisations to improve their performance and compliance through the development and effectiveness of their own safety and compliance management systems.
- Ensuring that safety, compliance, training and operations manuals and other documents and reports submitted by training organisations comply with the applicable regulatory requirements and standards before accepting them.
- Approval of a training organisation’s proposed nominated key people including, but not limited to, Accountable Manager, Safety Manager, Compliance Monitoring Manager, Head of Training, Chief Flying Instructor, Chief Theoretical Knowledge Instructor, and Seminar Tutor.
- Collaborating with other Flight Op’s inspectors and officers to ensure the effective oversight of pilot training and testing carried out by organisations associated with commercial air transport operators.
- Ensuring competence of training organisations associated with public transport and police operators.
- Verifying continuing regulatory compliance of allocated training organisations through onsite audits and inspections within pre-defined oversight cycle periods contained in current Flight Op’s business rules.
- Maintaining accurate records of evaluation, inspection and auditing events and consequent oversight reporting.
- Recommending appropriate actions to the team lead for findings of significant non-compliances with applicable regulations and the remit of an organisation’s certification or declaration and its own documentation.
- Prioritising raised non-compliances within a timetable of closure actions to ensure they are completed within allocated timeframes and findings have been rectified permanently to prevent recurrences.
- Processing requests from training organisations for exemptions and permissions from legislative requirements and other restrictions.
- Agreeing with the Investigations and Enforcement Team appropriate levels of investigation and supporting their consequent regulatory or criminal enforcement actions for apparent serious breaches of the law.
- Capturing and sharing safety-related intelligence, information and analysis from multiple internal and external sources with all CAA groups in support of EPT/IRM processes.
- Escalating risks to the appropriate management level within SARG.

**About You**

Minimum essential requirements for the role:

- Strong interpersonal skills to influence accountable managers and other key position holders within regulated organisations.
- Empathy with challenges faced by smaller organisations delivering professional-level flight training to feed the commercial pilot supply chain.
- Experienced and comfortable with either working alone or within a team.
- Aviation related degree or equivalent professional level qualification.
- Holds or has held an ATPL or CPL/IR on aeroplanes and/or helicopters.
- Significant experience as a flight instructor or examiner operating within UK airspace.
- Significant experience in aviation-related managerial positions including Head of Training in an approved training organisation or equivalent position in a commercial air transport operator.
- Experienced in the use of management systems, business planning, performance management monitoring (safety and business), risk assessment and mitigation, training development and the management of change.
- In-depth knowledge of the Aircrew Regulation, the Air Navigation Order, organisation certification and UK pilot licensing practices.
- Understand the priority of compliance and safety management over operational and commercial constraints found within regulated organisations.
- Employs a structured problem-solving approach