**4. Conclusions**

In Australia, the diverse profile of General Aviation does, indeed, pose challenges for effectively managing safety and performance in aircraft maintenance operations. Based on the perceptions of this study, it is unsurprising that this has been a targeted area for continuous improvement.

The findings highlight that for the most part, perceived changes in the role of the regulator and regulation within the sector are not only perceived to have impacted the behaviours of the system underpinning the sector, but also diminished operations around safety and invoked a general view of a negative safety climate.

There are many perceived practical and operational challenges in the GA sector that must be dealt with to sustain safe maintenance operations going forward, many of which require change and growth across various cultural dimensions, and not only in how maintenance engineers and technicians work, but also other areas of the system, including the regulator, policy and practice, customers/owners, and tertiary education and vocational training.

In nearly every regard, if a central theme was to be assigned to this study it is that the GA sector is an ostensibly complex system, with high stakes in safety, and would therefore benefit from systems thinking when seeking to facilitate change management.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.N. and K.I.K.; methodology, A.N.; formal analysis, A.N.; investigation, A.N. and K.I.K.; validation, K.I.K.; data curation, A.N.; writing—original draft preparation, A.N. and K.I.K.; writing—review and editing, A.N. and K.I.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors are extremely grateful to Kate Kingshott for her significant role in the collection of the data used to underpin this research, and are very thankful for her support during very early discussions of this study.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
