Regulatory Framework Of Australian Defence Force (EDA)

History has shown the need for continuously improving regulations which govern air operations and maintenance of aircraft. In this sense, military airworthiness authorities are committed to this task and, in recent years, military aviation regulatory frameworks have progressed considerably. Military aviation operations are spread across the world originating the necessity of having analogous regulatory framework in order to facilitate operations. Australian Defence Force (ADF), driven by the same aim, has developed the Defence Aviation Safety Regulations (DASRs) derived from the European Military Airworthiness Requirements (EMARs). Moreover, the European Defence Agency (EDA) has pioneered the interoperability area by establishing a recognition

Introduction
1.1 Background
In today's society, air transport is a critical factor in helping the world to develop and grow. In recent years, governmental bodies and organisations have placed special emphasis on improving aviation safety regulations in order to have safer air operations. In this regard, Australian Defence Force (ADF) is not the exception.

Due to its unique nature and extreme operating environments, military aviation depends less on a specific regulatory framework and more on mission capability. They take a risk based approach and have the flexibility to fly aircraft even when they are at times un-airworthy. In contrast to civil aviation activities, where their objective is primarily focused on the safe and efficient transport of people. Throughout time, military aviation organisations have placed a higher priority on achieving mission objectives, and less so on the preservation of the material assets. Nevertheless, the ADF’s aviation safety regulations have also evolved through

This was to standardise maintenance, operation and airworthiness statutes. Hopkins (2005) identified aspects embedded within the culture of the Australian Royal Air Force (RAAF) where operations (flying) had priority over logistics (maintenance) and, furthermore, the way the RAAF is structured contributed to incidents, near misses and accidents.

Figure 1 shows how the aviation regulatory framework within the ADF has progressed over the past 25 years (De Luis, pp 42, 2014). It can be easily seen that since the introduction of technical regulations that governed how continuing airworthiness in Defence should be carried out, there was a significant decline in fatal crashes.

Figure 1: Defence fatal Accidents 1985-2014 (De Luis,