What the CAA actually asks for, and where it comes from

An audit request is not a mystery. It is a list. Every item on it is a document you either kept at the time or are now rebuilding from memory, a phone gallery and a WhatsApp thread.

The rebuilding is the part that hurts. Nobody minds proving their pilots were current. They mind spending a fortnight on it.

So it is worth being clear about what gets asked for, and about which part of the ordinary week produces each piece.

The pack, and its six steps

Operations builds a CAA audit pack through a wizard. The shape of the wizard is really just the shape of the question.

Step one, an audit due date. Everything else is measured from it. The flight window, and the maintenance window.

Step two, the flights. You pick which flights the pack covers, and they gather under a running selection.

Step three, the flight documents. Each selected flight is checked for its paperwork. A job with completed in-app forms reads Ops Pack: Present. One with none reads Ops Pack: Missing (no in-app forms completed). There is no polite way to dress that up. Either the survey was filled in on the day or it was not.

Step four, the organisation documents. Three things the regulator asks of the operator rather than of any one flight: Operations Manual Volume 1, Operations Manual Volume 2, and your Operator ID.

Step five, the maintenance records. Maintenance evidence for the airframes that flew, including a three-month window per flight.

Step six, review and generate. Every flight is listed against three evidence rows. Ops Pack, signed CAP2606 Annex 2 survey, and whether the survey date matches the flight. Each is marked present or missing. When the summary is clean, you generate.

The pack comes out as a revision rather than a file that overwrites itself. Build it again next year and you get a new one. The version you submitted last year stays exactly as you sent it.

Where each piece comes from

Here is what those six steps quietly depend on. Not one of the documents is written for the pack. They are all by-products of doing the job.

The Ops Pack is the forms the pilot filled in on the day. The pre-flight survey, the RAMS, the CAP2606 Annex 2 with its GO and NO-GO decisions, the briefing, the debrief. Doing the work produces it.

The Annex 2 is generated from the job and the pre-flight records, which is why it agrees with the crew list and the aircraft serial. When it stops agreeing, because a pilot was swapped out or a different airframe went up on the day, a banner appears on the survey itself. It names each mismatch, in the form UA serial number: declared G-ABCD, job has G-WXYZ, and warns that the pack will reject the flight until the two agree. Better to hear that in March than in the review step in October.

The logbooks come from the flights. One sidebar entry, two views. The flight logbook is organised by who flew. The technical logbook is organised by what flew. Both are built from the same records. Upload a log, link the airframe, assign the pilot, and the entry appears in both.

Flight currency is calculated, not declared. Operations takes the assessment date, steps back a whole number of calendar months, adds up every approved flight that pilot flew on aircraft in that equivalence group inside the window, and compares the total against the hours you require. Each flight expires on the anniversary of its own date, so a pilot does not lose everything at once, and the warning lead time means they hear about it before they fall short.

The clearance record is the decision itself. Which findings were blocking. Which confirm findings were accepted, and by whom. What the written justification said. Who authorised the override and when it expired. Supersede it with a newer decision and the old one stays, marked as superseded.

The bit that makes it work

None of this is retyped for the pack. That is worth spelling out, because it is what you actually get.

What you submit is what you recorded at the time. Not a tidy version put together the week before the audit from calendar entries and best recollection. The actual forms, with the actual timestamps, carrying the decision somebody made standing on the site. An auditor asking why a flight went ahead with a blocking finding gets the justification that was written that morning, with the name of the person who wrote it.

It also means problems show up early. A missing Ops Pack reads as a missing Ops Pack months before anyone is waiting on the answer.

Two honest limitations

Neither logbook has an export button. Flight history comes in through a CSV import, but structured output for an auditor is produced by the reports and the audit pack instead, which is where the formatting, evidence checks and manifests live. That is deliberate rather than an oversight, though we will not pretend nobody has gone looking for the button.

And the pack sits behind a plan feature and the Manage org settings permission. Not every plan includes it. Reports and the CAA audit pack sets out what you need, and the pricing page shows which plan carries it.

Worth knowing before an audit letter lands rather than after.