OVERVIEW

The flight procedure development process involves input from a variety of personnel. Surveyors, AIS personnel, ground validation personnel, flight validation pilots and designers all play a key role in the development of a quality flight procedure. To ensure quality it is essential to provide competency-based training and assessment to all contributors to the flight procedure development process, as indicated in the Procedures for Air Navigation Services (PANS-OPS, Doc 8168), Volume II, Part I, Section 2, Chapter 4, 4.7, Procedure designer qualifications and training. While this training manual focuses on the competency requirements that a flight procedure designer should achieve, it should be understood that the designer's work depends on other personnel also meeting competency standards.

The activities of flight procedure designers are considered critical to the safety of aviation. The provision of erroneous, incomplete or badly designed flight procedures and associated minima has direct consequences for the users.

Recently, procedure design work has become more critical due to:

– increasing complexity;

– increased importance of data integrity, especially for modern area navigation (RNAV) and satellitebased navigation; and

– introduction of new avionics.