It always disappoints me the lack of evidence base to many (all?) of the regulatory changes that have occurred over the last few years. I also wonder about the regulation that’s was drawn up before that as well.
The would also appear to be no audit to see if the changes have had the desired effect effect.
I find this quite surprising as in medicine evidence based practice is apparently fundamental to patient care.
Are there any peer reviewed aviation journals and if so does EASA/NAA ever use them as part of the regulatory process?
Bathman wrote:
Are there any peer reviewed aviation journals and if so does EASA/NAA ever use them as part of the regulatory process?
Good question. I have no idea, but there probably are hundreds of them when considering the size of – and the money in the aviation industry. When looking at the regulations for GA though, they seems to be made out of 4 ingrediens:
I think almost every industry has a pile of specialised magazines. There are about a dozen publications in “industrial control” for example, just in the UK.
The quality of trade mags is however poor these days. Almost nobody reads them; they go in the bin in minutes. They survive, just about, because most companies just chuck an advert budget at the usual things and don’t have any way of monitoring where their sales come from. And probably most people find your business on google anyway… plus trade exhibitions for those who have time to go to them. The articles in them are “advertorials” i.e. paid submissions from advertisers. There is almost no real editorial content.
I have not seen such mags in light GA but would think jet aviation has loads of them. One sometimes sees them at bizjet lounges, along the fat glossy mags packed with perfumes, fashion and jewellery 
Whether any of these are relevant to safety studies, I don’t know and have never seen any such publications covering GA.
Regarding peer review, there is a lot of that in the medical profession and I am told it is often worth a lot less than one might think because the “peers” are on the payroll of various companies whose products are often only slightly better than placebo 
Aviation regulation is something which just grows according to the whims of whoever is having a go at it. Recently, EASA has had a fresh look at some of it, with seemingly interesting / positive results on the horizon. The extent to which they use evidence is an interesting question – maybe @bookworm knows? A lot of regulation is purely emotional (a plane falling out of the sky on a school / hospital / convent / etc) and if somebody looked at e.g. third party risk they would find almost nothing, so that is an area ripe for deregulation – in theory!
The Royal Institute of Navigation publishes a proper journal with peer-reviewed paperson maritime and air navigation. It’s rather dry stuff though, and is more technical analyses of ATC systems and the like on the aviation side.
There are several journals on the medical side but their evidence is routinely ignored by European regulators (new FTLs for example completely ignored thee vidence on fatigue in favour of a political stitch up) so while professionally interesting, it is only one of the impute into the regulatory sausage machine.
