On September 16 last year, the leadership for the certification departments of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Brazil’s Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil (ANAC), the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Transport Canada Civil Aviation (TCCA) signed a charter to create the Certification Management Team (CMT). Their goal was straightforward: through collaboration to improve the efficiency of and reduce the time involved with both the domestic and foreign aircraft certification process.
This week the CMT published a strategy document on how they intend to achieve this goal.
The basic structure of the Certificate Management Team, according to CMT “will manage technical, policy, and bilateral agreement certification, manufacturing, export and continued airworthiness issues common among the four authorities.” The result is that they will be overseeing five technical Certification Authorities:
• Certification Authorities for Bilateral Agreement (CABA) and Certification Policy
• Certification Authorities for General Aviation Products (CAGP)
• Certification Authorities for Transport Airplane (CATA)
• Certification Authorities for Rotorcraft Products (CARP)
• Certification Authorities for Propulsion Products (CAPP)
In addition, the CMT will aim to implement “confidence-building initiatives and risk based validation principles” which will basically permit partners to accept certification activities from other partners with either limited or no additional technical involvement. This is a very notable expansion of previous initiatives, which will now allow authorities to maximize their reliance on the certificating authority.
According to the FAA, this process is “transforming how the FAA prioritizes and targets resources to engage with the international aviation community to improve safety, efficiency, and environmental sustainability through regulatory harmonization and partnerships.”
The FAA and EASA have also established a bilateral Validation Improvement Roadmap (VIR) that specifically defines the specific bilateral initiatives. According to the FAA, “The continued globalization of the aviation industry has prompted collaboration among the world’s civil aviation authorities to harmonize regulatory systems. Industry growth has increased the level of domestic certification activity, and validation projects from emerging States of Design are placing growing resource demands on other authorities. By maximizing the use of existing U.S. bilateral partnerships with our CMT partner countries, we can reduce the amount of effort all of the agencies currently expend on validation programs.”
