The UK Civil Aviation Authority’s (CAA) Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) is the accepted means of applying for a Specific Category operational authorisation. To support this, the British Standards Institution (BSI) has published a guide – BSI Flex 1906 v1.0 to support those planning operations in this category.
“Amongst the SORA requirements, some specifically call for the use of a standard or other means of compliance (MoC) acceptable to the CAA. In many instances, a specific standard or MoC has not yet been identified in UK SORA,” BSI says. “The main objective of this BSI Flex is to identify and simplify references to standards and MoC where these are specifically required in UK SORA and within the scope defined in the guidance. To achieve this, it draws largely upon the technical assessment of standards already conducted as part of Project Shepherd (2021-2024)1) and focuses on how those results relate specifically to the requirements relevant to the scope of this BSI Flex.”
BSI notes that the guidance also considers MoC which have previously been developed by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) as an Acceptable Means of Compliance (AMC) to requirements in the EASA version of SORA (where they are broadly similar to UK SORA requirements for a standard or MoC).
The guide was delivered with input from a range of stakeholders and organisations, including the CAA. It provides structured direction on how existing standards can be used to meet operational safety objectives, and includes guidance on containment requirements, ground risk class mitigations and functional test-based methods.
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Image: British Standards Institution
