Avionics News April 2018 - 65

information to determine the airworthiness status or eligibility
for installation." If a part is new, or otherwise in satisfactory
condition, then that necessary information includes an EASA
Form One or equivalent. So lack of such documentation means
that the part is unserviceable. This is a neat little loophole that
allows a European repair station to accept a part without the
"right documentation" as unserviceable, inspect it to determine
serviceability, and then tag the part as serviceable to be consumed by the repair station in a subsequent maintenance activity.
This "loophole" does not open the repair station to unsafe
parts. The "unserviceable part" is required to be segregated and
properly handled, and must be directed through a maintenance
activity. Remember: An inspection is a maintenance activity by
regulatory definition, so properly inspecting a part to confirm
its serviceability is OK to close the loop on the part; and, of
course, maintenance must be performed according to appropriate instructions, so if there is no acceptable inspection to
confirm serviceability, then there may be no way to make the
"unserviceable part" into a serviceable one.
Once the part has been determined to be serviceable through
testing and/or inspection, the repair station typically needs to
document that maintenance activity by issuing an airworthiness document (e.g. a maintenance release on an EASA Form
One). And after that, the part has the right documentation to be
accepted into the EASA 145 system.
The European system works well - better than some might
think - because of the careful way that the drafters put together
their regulations (including loopholes that permit a safe mechanism for bringing in parts that don't meet prima facie documentation expectations).
If documentation is required in Europe but not in the United
States, then why is documentation such a headache in the
United States? There are many answers, but two stick out: (1)
commercial practice, and (2) recent changes to the U.S.-EU
agreements that mirror neither the U.S. nor the EU systems.
Commercial practice has been a significant driver for traceability requirements in the United States.
Commercial practice can be driven by many motivators, like
liability concerns, risk mitigation, belief that the documentation
can support a safety analysis, desire for an audit trail, desire
for a document that looks a certain way, and even experience
in other industry sectors that have influenced civil aviation and
that have used documentation successfully to achieve a goal.
When someone like a customer or a business partner demands
that you include traceability in a transaction, and the law does
not demand that same level of traceability (or in many cases,
when the law does not demand any traceability), the traceability demand is based on commercial practice. As such, omitting

the commercial practice traceability might be legal, but your
business partner might unilaterally decide to discontinue doing
business with you if you fail to meet the business partner's
expectations. So in order to maintain our good business relations, we accept these commercial practices.
Sometimes, commercial practices start with the government.
For example, if your FAA inspector tells you that you should be
seeking certain traceability documents in order to improve your
business (despite the fact that the regulations do not require it),
then your adoption of this suggestion would be a commercial
practice, despite the fact that it was a recommendation from
a government employee. The FAA regulations do not require
traceability documentation in parts sales, but the FAA has made
recommendations for what it considered to be acceptable minimum standards of traceability in FAA Advisory Circular 00-56.
Finally, the documentation requirements of the United
States have become less clear due to recent revisions in the
Maintenance Annex Guidance that was signed between the
United States and the European Union. This MAG details documentation requirements that are not identical to the European
regulatory requirements. In talks with executives from the
EASA, the agency has explained it knows this imposes a burden on U.S. repair stations and suggested that it's in the process
of changing EU regulations in a way that will soon be reflected
in the MAG (and it has pledged that the MAG problem will be
fixed when the EASA regulations are changed).
Recognizing that the MAG did not actually reflect EU
regulations, which caused it to impede repair station business unnecessarily, the FAA created a series of "fixes." These
"fixes" included Notice 8900.429 (authorizing repair stations
to inspect parts for airworthiness and accept them into inventory, despite the apparent prohibitions of the MAG) and a series
of policy memos authorizing additional DARs to issue 8130-3
tags for known airworthy parts (to increase the volume of parts
that meet the MAG provisions).
Oh yes - I almost forgot about that snail question. Would a
snail be faster or slower if you were to remove its shell? If you
remove a snail's shell, it gets more sluggish.
So if you are puzzled by the current documentation rules for
inbound parts in your repair station, take heart! The FAA cannot enforce the MAG documentation requirement for aircraft
parts through direct enforcement action because of the protections of the Paperwork Reduction Act (although they can slow
up your EASA 145 renewal, so be sure to cooperate with your
FAA maintenance inspectors to keep them in the loop on your
compliance practices). We are in the process of working with
the FAA and the EASA to better clarify the documentation
puzzle. They are both cooperating, but the pace of government
sometimes tends to be a little sluggish. q
avionics news

april

2018

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