Safety and changes in the Norwegian aviation transport system - What is the role of the legislator and the regulator?

The aim of this paper is to study how political priorities at the legislative level, how enforcing practices at the regulatory level, and how changes at these levels might have an impact on safety in the aviation transport system. We will explore the political part of the aviation system: the Ministry of Transport and Communications, and the executive part of the system, the Civil Aviation Authority. Besides describing and seeking to understand the role of the legislator and the regulator, we also search for their interactions with the other parts of the aviation transport system. An understanding of the political, legislative, and regulative levels of the aviation transport system is necessary for understanding the work and priorities of maintaining safety at the lower levels of the system. The data in the paper is based on 38 qualitative interviews, and participant observation at different levels of the aviation transport system.