Manual of Haiti's State Safety Programme (PNS)
- OFNAC's authority to endorse the PNS rests on the organic law published on 22 September 2017, and the Director General signed the manual on 7 September 2023, so the state safety programme is a recent instrument even though the enabling law is six years older.
- The manual makes state oversight and operator self-management interdependent rather than alternative. Providers must run safety management systems, and those systems must in turn be subject to effective regulatory surveillance, which places the binding requirement on OFNAC and DSACH capacity as much as on operators.
- The manual is the framework, not the work programme. It explicitly delegates objectives, targets and improvement initiatives to the National Aviation Safety Plan (NASPH), so a reader assessing what Haiti is actually committed to achieving in aviation safety needs the NASPH alongside it.
- The single amendment recorded in the 2023 version is to section 6.4, to take account of the creation of DSACH's own organization manual, which indicates that the directorate's internal structure was being formalized at the same time as the safety programme.
- The manual mobilizes both OFNAC's internal resources, DSACH in particular, and the external resources of service providers, and states that it exists to direct available human and financial resources toward priority safety activities. That framing is an acknowledgment that resources are the constraint being managed.
Haiti's State Safety Programme manual (Manuel du Programme national de sécurité, PNS), version 2023, endorsed on 7 September 2023 by the Director General of the National Office of Civil Aviation (OFNAC) under the powers given to him by the organic law published on 22 September 2017. It is the standing framework document: it describes how the Haitian state, rather than any single operator, manages aviation safety as a system.
The manual sets out four purposes for the PNS: to confirm that the state has a minimum regulatory framework in place, to make it possible to monitor and assess the overall safety performance of Haitian operators, to coordinate and continuously strengthen the state's own safety management functions, and to support effective interaction with the safety management systems (SMS) that service providers are required to run. The logic is deliberately two-sided. The state builds a PNS, providers build SMS, and each provider's SMS must be subject to effective regulatory oversight, so the manual is as much about what OFNAC and the Civil Aviation Safety Directorate (DSACH) must be able to do as about what airlines and airport operators must do.
The structure follows the four ICAO components. Component one, state safety policy, objectives and resources, designates the authority responsible for the PNS and the key actors and bodies within it, then covers basic aeronautical legislation, specific operating regulations, sanctions, mandatory and voluntary event reporting, qualified technical personnel, and the provision of technical guidance, tools and safety-critical information. Component two, state safety risk management, covers licensing, certification, authorization and approval obligations, SMS obligations, accident and incident investigation, hazard identification, risk mapping, risk assessment and mitigation, and the resolution of safety issues. The remaining components cover safety assurance, including surveillance and performance measurement, and safety promotion.
A cross-reference matters for readers: the manual points to the National Aviation Safety Plan (NASPH) as the instrument that carries the actual objectives, targets and improvement initiatives for a given period. Read the manual for the machinery and the NASPH for what that machinery is currently trying to achieve. Note that the stored text of this document is affected by scanning noise in the table of contents and headings; section numbering in this record follows the readable body text.
How to cite
National Civil Aviation Office (OFNAC), 2023, Manual of Haiti's State Safety Programme (PNS), https://ofnac.gouv.ht/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Manuel-PNS.pdf