Over the past 20 years, European aviation has maintained an outstanding safety record, supported by a robust and comprehensive regulatory framework. As safety requirements have grown increasingly complex, keeping pace with evolving regulations has become challenging — and the risk of inconsistencies between rules has risen. To address this, EASA has launched a Rule Simplification Programme as part of the EU’s Better Regulation policy. This initiative aims to make the regulatory framework easier to understand, implement, and manage, while preserving safety and supporting innovation, efficiency, and industry competitiveness.
Strategic alignment
The programme aligns with EASA’s strategic priorities, particularly:
- Safety: Eliminating unnecessary requirements and ensuring proportionality to risk while closing regulatory gaps.
- Innovation: Safely integrating new technologies and market developments into aviation systems.
It also supports broader EU goals, particularly:
- Competitiveness : Supporting the European Commission’s Competitiveness Compass by reducing administrative burdens, enhancing industry competitiveness, and aligning with EU-wide goals to modernise policies for productivity and growth.
- Better Regulation: Picking up on the Commission’s Communication on Simplification, which emphasises streamlined processes and proportionate oversight to ensure regulatory efficiency without compromising safety.
Governance and the Joint MAB/SAB Simplification Board (JSB)
The programme is guided by the Joint MAB/SAB Simplification Board (JSB), established in May 2025. Comprising 14 members (6 from the Member States Advisory Board (MAB), 6 from the Stakeholders Advisory Board (SAB), 1 from the European Commission (EC), and 1 from EUROCONTROL), the JSB advises EASA on identifying, prioritising, and implementing simplification actions. Its objectives include:
- Identifying areas for simplification in EASA’s regulatory framework and implementation processes.
- Promoting an outcomes-focused, cross-domain approach to reduce duplication and enhance clarity.
- Ensuring stakeholder engagement and transparency throughout the programme.
Latest update — March 2026
The data collection phase of the programme has been completed. It provides a vital and robust evidence base. Thank you to everyone who took part in the Stakeholder Survey – there were 1,151 responses in total.
The five most frequently commented areas/regulations were continuing airworthiness, aircrew, air operations, aerodromes, and cross-cutting issues spanning multiple regulatory domains.
Initial analysis has identified six recurring themes that stakeholders consistently associate with administrative burden across all areas and regulations:
- Insufficient proportionality and weak risk-based application. Uniform requirements are applied regardless of scale or risk, resulting in disproportionate approval, audit, training and documentation obligations for low-risk activities.
- Lengthy and unpredictable approval, certification and change processes. Stakeholders highlight extended timelines, iterative review cycles, unclear evidentiary expectations and uncertainty in change classification.
- AMC/GM clarity, stability, usability and interpretative consistency. Feedback points to unclear guidance material, frequent changes and divergent interpretations between competent authorities.
- Documentation, reporting and record-keeping burden. Administrative burden arises from duplicate submissions, over-specified manuals and extensive record-retention requirements.
- Limited digitalisation and fragmented IT tools. Manual processes and fragmented digital portals are reported across several domains, increasing workload and inefficiency.
- Inconsistent oversight and national implementation. This leads to duplication, re-interpretation of requirements and limited mutual recognition.
A common feature across all these topics is the strong implementation dimension. Stakeholders’ concerns relate not only to the regulatory requirements themselves, but also to how they are applied in practice. This confirms that the full benefits of simplification can only be achieved through coordinated and harmonised action by EASA and the Commission, Member States and industry.
Rule simplification is therefore both a shared priority and a shared responsibility.
What’s Next?
The data analysis and prioritisation phase will take place in the first half of 2026. A set of guidelines for analysing and prioritising the stakeholder feedback have been developed jointly with the JSB to ensure consistency and stakeholder feedback.
The results of the data analysis exercise will lead to the development of a prioritised list of actions to address the feedback received from stakeholders. These actions will comprise not only rulemaking, but also actions aiming at improving implementation of the rules (such as safety promotion and implementation support) and their development process (such as actions aiming at improving the EASA rulemaking planning and processing). This list will be presented to the EASA Advisory Bodies in Q2 2026.
The resulting activities will then be introduced in the next version of the European Plan for Aviation Safety due to be published in December 2026.
A number of short-term actions have already been identified with deliverables already published in RMT.0727, RMT.0735 and RMT.0707.