Embedding Professional Ethics and Safety Responsibility in Aviation Law Education: A Case-Based Curriculum Design in Chinese Higher Education

Aviation law education for safety-critical professions must develop more than recall of regulations: graduates also need to reason about legal duties, public safety and professional responsibility. In China, curriculum-integrated ideological and political education encourages these values-related aims to be addressed within disciplinary courses, but published accounts rarely show how objectives, classroom tasks and assessment evidence are aligned. This study presents a practice-oriented curriculum design for an undergraduate Aviation Law course taught to air traffic management students at the Civil Aviation Flight University of China. Using documentary analysis of the course objectives, syllabus and teaching materials, the authors decomposed the objectives into three outcome domains, mapped eight chapters, grouped into six modules, to twelve teaching cases and their values-related themes, and reconstructed a four-stage lesson on search and rescue and accident investigation built around the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the 2010 Yichun accident. The design links legal knowledge, regulatory reasoning and ethical judgement through aligned objectives, a module–case matrix, a four-stage lesson sequence, four implementation strands and a five-dimensional rubric for assessing regulation-informed professional judgement. No learner-outcome data were collected, so effectiveness is not claimed; an evaluation using independently rated case responses is proposed. The framework offers a transferable template for safety-critical professional programmes.