Aviation Regulation - ICAO, IATA, and CAAs

Welcome to my first professional post in UlricaPen!
I'm going to mention about something very basic and simple.
However, I believe there are many people still not very sure about what's the difference from them.
That's why I start with these very common words in aviation industry.
I will talk about the main concepts of them, and I may talk about more detail in the other articles in the future.

ICAO

from http://www.icao.int/about-icao/Pages/default.aspx



Before we talk about ICAO, I want to mention an ancient emperor in China: Qin Shi Huang. This ancient emperor is the first emperor who ruled the several nations into one "China". As you know, China is a big land, and it was separated by several nations before Qin dynasty. One of the greatest policy Qin Shi Huang did is to make a unified standard in measurement such as weights, measures, and what I drew, the size of the wheels. This policy stimulate Chinese economic rapidly.

Let's get back to ICAO. It was after WW2. The aircraft technology was getting mature in several nations. However, there was no clear limitation for the sky, people were using different languages and measurements. It was dangerous and inefficient for flying on the sky around the world!

As the result, ICAO came out!!!

We cannot merge all the nations around the world into one nation as Qin Shi Huang did, but we can make an organization to ask all the member nations follow the standard we made through this organization.

IATA

Unlike ICAO with several national governments as its members, IATA, International Air Transportation Association is a trade association for the worlds' airlines.


from http://www.iata.org/about/Pages/mission.aspx

IATA is an association, in Chinese we can call it 行業公會. People are gathering together and discussing about how to make win win in their market. They will find out how to make their service better, more efficient, and more safe.
Because my experience is not in an airline, I'm not so familiar with IATA. I may not mention too much about IATA in the future.
 

CAAs

CAA, Civil Aviation Authority, generally, all the civil aviation authorities in different countries can be called CAA, but sometimes people may call them differently in their countries. For example, in United states, we call it FAA. In Japan, we call it JCAB. CAAs belong to their national government. They may not make laws, but they enforce aviation laws.
The very special one is EASA in Europe. It's not a CAA. Every country which is the member in EASA has it's own CAA, but it also follows the rule under EASA. I will talk about EASA more in the following articles.

Conclution

As you can see, ICAO and IATA are quite different on  their members. As the result, the main considerations of them would also be different.
However, one thing would be same for all. We want to fly safely (under the cost we can afford! Lol).

That's all for this article. It's basic and simple.
I may talk about more detail about ICAO in the following article.
Please rub your eyes and wait! (It's a Chinese proverb about "Let's wait and see")

Ciao~