The DGAC automates its complex administrative procedures

The DSAC (Civil Aviation Safety Department) is a national department of the DGAC (General Directorate of Civil Aviation). The competent French authority in matters of surveillance and certification for the safety and security of civil aviation, it is in particular in charge of issuing certificates of aptitude for flight personnel. This involves piloting and controlling theoretical and practical exams, issuing licenses, certifying and monitoring training organizations, approving aero-medical centers and doctors in charge of issuing certificates, etc. All these procedures are administratively very cumbersome and, since 2019, the DSAC has been looking for ways to optimize their operation.

In its preliminary study of 2019, the DSAC indeed considered it necessary, in order to optimize the procedure, to dematerialize the forms for entering information (as well as the entire pilot file), to make them accessible through a portal comprising all the information needed to guide applicants and automate processing as much as possible. Candidates’ basic requests should, in particular, be able to be processed through a chatbot. The file processing process also had to be automated as much as possible through an RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solution. In all, nearly 250 forms had to be dematerialized and the associated procedures automated.

To begin with, a first project aimed to optimize and modernize the processing of files relating to flight personnel applying for European non-professional pilot licenses. The DSAC then examined the solutions on the market and decided, just before the summer of 2021, to acquire 6TZen from Efalia. Once this dematerialization solution with electronic initials and related tools was chosen, definition workshops were organized immediately between the publisher and the DSAC. Each step requiring human validation triggers a notification to the person concerned who can sign electronically and trigger the rest of the procedure. The dematerialization has been accompanied by a rationalization, the number of forms necessary for pilot candidates has thus fallen from 40 to 8.