legislative B Y J A S O N D I C K S T E I N AEA GENERAL COUNSEL Managing the repair station's compliance E very now and then, it is a good idea to double-check your repair station's compliance status. I have seen a number of certificate holders encounter problems because they became noncompliant with the regulations over time. Examples include repair stations whose work scope gradually diverged from the limits of their operations specifications, and manufacturers whose employees stopped consulting the procedures manuals (because they felt that they knew the manuals), and over time eventually began to diverge from the procedures manuals. There are a number of tools that should be used by Aircraft Electronics Association member companies in order to maintain compliance. The first tool is a thorough intake process for new tasks that ensures each new task faced by the repair station is analyzed to ensure the repair station has the appropriate elements available in order to do the work: * Ratings. * Operations specifications and capabilities. * Personnel (including personnel ratings and personnel training). * Housing and facilities. * Tooling and equipment. * Technical data. * Quality inspection mechanisms. * Approvals and listings for any subcontracted work. 48 avionics news * august 2016 By having a process in place to audit for these elements before the repair station starts a job, you help ensure that you have all of the right capabilities in place to perform the work. The process also helps identify when those capabilities are not yet in place, which allows you to better plan to obtain what you need (e.g. if the op specs or capabilities list don't encompass the work you intend to perform, then you know you need to get them amended before you begin). A second tool is periodic self-audits. One challenge in making self-audits truly useful can be developing an audit checklist that is sufficiently robust to allow the auditor to properly identify compliance issues. A good way to start developing your internal audit checklist is to list all the regulations with which the repair station complies and make them the backbone of your audit checklist. The regulations are just a starting point - but they are a good starting point. The internal audit checklist also should address the quality system elements of the repair station to ensure they are functioning as expected. As you encounter issues and develop corrective actions to address them, you may wish to supplement your internal audit checklist to ensure that corrective actions are adequately implemented, and that they are achieving the expected result. An internal audit does not have to check compliance with every detail of the checklist, all at once. You can have a rotat-