Our External Audit

One of the activities that has to be taken by an aviation training school is to be subjected to the external audit by the authorities. It can be audited by it own quality department, an airlines or a client, or the airworthiness authority.

We wanted to market our product to another country, and the clients, being international airlines, need to get the green light from its airworthiness authority. With the approval of the country's authority, our courses can be sold to another country.

Three auditors came from the country, two from the DCA, or department of civil aviation and one of the client airline.

The preparation was made months in advance. A welcoming dinner was arranged on the night before the event at a local restaurant. There were 10 or us and 3 auditors, the CEO, the SGM, Training Manager, The School Manager, Quality Manager, Executive, Ceo officer, two drivers and another Dato' came. It was a oversized gathering at the expense of our hard stressed company. The food was ample followed by the local delicacy of the king of the fruit, durian. It was about $750 for the total.

The next day, the audit started. The opening was suppose to be at 9 am, the auditors came late about 930 am, and the CEO and SGM were much later. So the auditors had to wait for the them, something that I thought was of of place.

The audit started by the opening remark by the CEO, giving some overview about the company and the vision, followed by opening remarks by the quality manager giving more details about the structure and the awards acquired by the company.

Then it was given to the auditor to start the external audit.

It had been the practice to audit the company exposition, a policy and procedure manual giving the details of how the company is operating. However as opposite to a normal ISO audit, we are guided by the EASA documents of part 147 and part 66.

The first day audit had uncovered many areas of improvements, some are about processes where were not documented, while others about proving that we followed the processes.

Basically this is how it works...

a. The part 147 and 66 give the requirements on how to run an aviation school and what syllabus to follow.

b. The school has to write a manual to comply to the requirements. There are more documents required.

c. The school has to be operated based on the school's manual

The auditors will check on section b above... questions, is the manual comply to the requirements. Then they will check.. is the school operated in accordance to the manual.

Tomorrow will be another long day, the external auditors will be visiting the premises.