Draft rules under the 2023 Act

This page provides links to drafts of the Civil Aviation Rules which will come into effect on 5 April 2025, under the Civil Aviation Act 2023 (the 2023 Act).

These drafts are being provided now to give aviation participants visibility of the proposed realigned rules prior to them being finalised.

All Civil Aviation Rules need to be realigned to the 2023 Act. The Act provides a prescriptive process for doing this which means that significant policy changes impacting sector participants, have not been made as part of this work.

The goal is for the rules to align with the 2023 Act without changing the intent or impacting certificated participants’ compliance.

We've received a number of comments on the draft realigned rules, and the team will now consider these and make changes where appropriate and necessary. Our next steps will then be to send the draft rules to the Minister of Transport to make the rules. Once the Minister has made the rules, they will be published online as Pending Rules. In the meantime, we will keep the drafts available below.

You can find an overview of the rules realignment, including the standard changes common to all rules here:

Overview of rules realignment for Civil Aviation Act 2023 [PDF 313 KB]

Changes to the rules for realignment

The overview document explains the types of changes made to the rules for realignment. Most rules have just minor changes to support accuracy, coherency and changes in technology (i.e. typos, errors and other minor changes that don’t require policy thinking).  

In practice, this means that:

• The current rule numbering is retained in both rule parts and sub-parts.
• Each rule is updated to refer to the appropriate part of the 2023 Act instead of the 1990 Act.
• Language is being updated and modernised to improve ease of use, particularly for people who are not legally trained, e.g. the outdated term ‘forthwith’ will be replaced with ‘as soon as possible’.
• Definitions are referenced back to the 2023 Act.
• The word ‘shall’ is replaced by one of ‘must’, ‘may’ or ‘will’ so the intent is clear, definite, and commonly understood.
• To improve ease of use, acronyms are defined in the rules.
• References to specific CAA forms are replaced with ‘the approved CAA form’ to future proof the rules against changes to forms.
• Other changes to the rules are to align them with 2023 Act provisions, such as changes to aviation security, terminology, and technology.

There are some exceptions to the above list and other non-standard changes, where these have been made, are explained at the beginning of each draft rule document.

Draft rule parts

The draft rule parts linked below incorporate summaries of changes which are specific to that rule part and are beyond those outlined in the overview document.

If you see anything you believe is a technical error, please fill in this form to let us know.