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FAA’s Certification Reform Program Progressing

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Key Takeaways:

  • The FAA is modernizing its airplane certification process to be more tailored to an aircraft's complexity, moving away from a "highest common denominator" approach.
  • This initiative aims for "Twice the safety, half the cost," involves developing international standards through ICAO, and may apply industry best practices (ASTM) to larger general aviation aircraft.
  • The proposed system will classify airplanes into three tiers based on performance and complexity, with simpler aircraft receiving easier certification and all tiers benefiting from reduced costs and complexity.
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At Redbird’s annual migration on Tuesday, Pete Bunce, president of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, gave an update on the FAA’s efforts to modernize the agency’s airplane certification paradigm. The idea is to make it easier for manufacturers to certify airplanes as appropriate to the airplane’s complexity instead of, in Bunce’s words, certifying them to the “highest common denominator.”

Bunce said that the ASTM committee meeting with industry reps from around the globe gave him hope that the international standards body, ICAO, could arrive at international standards, so an airplane built in one country would be certification compliant in another country.

Isabel Goyer

A commercial pilot, Isabel Goyer has been flying for more than 40 years, with hundreds of different aircraft in her logbook and thousands of hours. An award-winning aviation writer, photographer and editor, Ms. Goyer led teams at Sport Pilot, Air Progress and Flying before coming to Plane & Pilot in 2015.

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