Business aviation leaders remain concerned about rhetoric and perceptions surrounding the use of delegation authority in product certifications and are stressing the need to impress upon Congress that sweeping changes would hamper, rather than improve safety.

At the annual General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) State of the Industry gathering on February 19, GAMA president and CEO Pete Bunce highlighted the many new traditional and non-traditional aircraft in the pipeline. “We have all of these companies working on new types of vehicles; it is literally going to change our world and it’s going to happen faster than people realize,” Bunce said. “When you look at the money that’s coming into the industry right now…this is not what we’ve seen in our industry in the last couple of decades.”

But this is what makes the certification process so important, he added. In the aftermath of the Boeing Max crashes, certification has become a focus on Capitol Hill and in the general public. Bunce is concerned about misreporting or misunderstanding of the process. 

“When people start talking about self-certification, they have no idea about how intricately and integrally involved the FAA is in each step of the process,” he stressed, highlighting a chart that GAMA created to help explain that process when industry executives meet with lawmakers. “You cannot take a complex system like certification and make it into an elevator speech—in an hour you are just scratching the surface.” The chart is one of the ways GAMA is hoping to ward off any attempts at wholesale changes, he said, stressing the need to get the message out about the importance of the delegation process.

“If we don’t delegate to experts that are out there in the industry and are overseen by the FAA, we are not able to refresh our products and make them safer,” Bunce said. “If we draw this process out longer and have longer cycles between new products in the system, it is not as safe.”

Manpower Concerns

Textron Aviation president and CEO Ron Draper, who spoke on a panel at the GAMA event, was even more pointed, saying, “Without that level of cooperation and back and forth [through delegation], product development would grind to a halt in the industry. It simply would not happen—there’s not enough manpower.”

Draper also hoped to dispel the myth that the use of organization designation authorization (ODA) represents an abdication of the FAA’s responsibilities or the relaxation of oversight. He cited Textron Aviation’s recent experience with the certification of the Citation Longitude, saying, “The certification process with the FAA on this jet was the most rigorous certification process on any airplane that we’ve done in our history, and we’ve done quite a few airplanes.”

The word “delegation” is a misnomer, Draper suggested. “Those that are outside the industry and point to this as a problem don’t understand the whole certification process. It’s not really a delegation,” he said. “The entire process is managed and controlled by the FAA.”

The FAA provides approval for everything beginning from the certification plan at the start of the process up through meeting standards for every individual system, Draper said. “Sometimes on a system, they retain all approval in a traditional certification process; Sometimes they say this is the fourth time you’ve done this hydraulic system and it's not changed from the last one—you still have to do all of the testing and show us the reports, but we let you do that work. So, the FAA orchestrates this like a conductor.”

Calling the system “very, very rigorous,” Draper said the data bears out the safety of the system. “It just gets safer and safer.” He agreed that there’s always room for improvement. “A productive dialog and debate on improving this absolutely should be had,” he said, but any movement to throw out the process and start over “would be a mistake.”

While the FAA has stressed the need for the system and talk of eliminating it altogether seem to be quieter, for now, key lawmakers have remained vocal about the need for changes.