A Maturity Model for Predicting Airport Safety Audit Outcomes in Resource-Constrained Regulatory Environments

Background: Airport safety audit outcomes at developing economy civil aviation authorities reflect the combined influence of regulatory framework maturity, inspector competency levels, aerodrome operator safety management capability, and institutional resource allocation that conventional audit scoring methodologies treat as a single aggregate compliance metric without providing the causal diagnostic information needed to predict future audit outcomes or to direct improvement investment toward the institutional and operational dimensions most likely to improve safety audit performance. A maturity model that characterizes the organizational safety management capability of aerodrome operators and regulatory authority inspection programs across multiple dimensions simultaneously would provide the diagnostic and predictive capability needed to advance airport safety oversight from reactive compliance assessment toward proactive capability development Methods: This paper develops a five-level Airport Safety Audit Outcome Maturity Model for aerodrome operators and civil aviation authority inspection programs in resource-constrained developing economy regulatory environments, comprising a multi-dimensional maturity assessment framework covering safety management system integration, regulatory compliance documentation quality, inspector competency and methodology, corrective action management, and organizational safety culture, calibrated against audit outcome data from the West African aerodrome certification program Results: The maturity model provides significant predictive validity for airport safety audit outcomes in the validation sample, with maturity level assessment conducted before an audit explaining a substantial proportion of the variance in audit compliance scores, outperforming both single-dimension capability assessments and the resource proxy variables traditionally used to predict developing economy civil aviation authority compliance performance Conclusion: The Airport Safety Audit Outcome Maturity Model provides NCAA and comparable developing economy civil aviation authorities with a theoretically grounded and empirically validated tool for predicting safety audit outcomes and guiding improvement investment that advances the state of practice in airport safety oversight capability assessment beyond the compliance snapshot approach of conventional audit methodology