Safety Standards Acknowledgment & Consent (CAP1395)

Safety Standards Acknowledgement and Consent (SSAC) is used for remunerated flights that are solely for recreational benefit and which could otherwise be conducted if they were private flights but with no money changing hands. It is not intended to provide a cheaper alternative for operators engaged in the transport of passengers or as a means of normalising extreme risk-taking. 

It is vital that CAP 1395 Safety Standards Acknowledgment and Consent remains up-to-date and relevant and that the CAA’s guidance material in this area remains as proportionate and clear as possible. This third edition contains a significant restructuring of the layout which now incorporates SSAC guidance and requirements previously contained in CAP632 “Operation of Permit-to-Fly ex-military aircraft on the UK register” which we have also recently updated. Various minor amendments were also untaken throughout the document.
Despite the circumstances related to COVID-19 on the flying community more generally, and in SSAC operations in particular; we nevertheless continued our review of CAP1395 and asked for feedback on proposed amendments. 

We compiled a draft of CAP 1395 Edition 3 and consulted on it over six working weeks from 24 July to 4 September 2020.  We had preceded this with a short pre-consultation with certain members of the community to make sure our proposals were on the right track, to which we received 27 comments, of which the vast majority were textual.

We received a total of 38 unique comments to the draft CAP from 9 respondents. All respondents were from the SSAC or display pilot community.

All the comments except two conveyed some sort of change. Of these:

• Just under half (16: 44%) were textual, suggesting revised wording or highlighting minor drafting points. Many of these comments were duplicated between respondents; and 
• Half (18) were more substantive in nature, calling for rethink of our approach or suggesting a change to the underlying policy.
• Two were unclear or unspecific.

We accepted 15 of the all the comments (42%).

Of the 16 textual comments received, we accepted 11. Most of these comprised rewording content for clarification, and we have tried to take a balanced view on what would be helpful. Of those we did not accept, two requested changes to text that most readers thought was satisfactory. Three called for revision to text that we had carefully drafted following extensive discussions internally.

Of the 18 comments that we regarded as more substantive, we implemented 4. Of the ones we chose not to implement, 9 suggested steps that we felt would have unintended consequences.  4 others asked us to expand on material that we thought was covered adequately either in this document or elsewhere. Finally one comment would have involved review or revision to underlying policy such as airworthiness, operations regulation or amendment to the underlying legislation, all of which are beyond the scope of this consultation. However, we welcome inputs to those wider policies, as and when these are released for public consultation.

Overall, we thank you for your comments and hope our revised CAP will be more workable for operators, pilots and participants.

Edition 3 has now been published: Safety Standards Acknowledgement and Consent (SSAC) Edition 3