Aircraft

Airframer defends plan to “grandfather” certification

Boeing is refuting Airbus’s accusation that its plan to certificate the 747-8 as a derivative of the existing 40-year-old design could make it less safe than if it was approved as an all-new model.

Airbus has suggested the Boeing plan to “grandfather” the certification of the new 467-seater enables it to dodge safety requirements introduced since the original 747 was launched in 1966.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes vice-president marketing Randy Baseler says that the comments from Airbus are a ‘sign of desperation’ and that the certification standard for the 747-8 “is decided by the regulatory authorities”.

The suggestion that its grandfather plan could mean the design is unsafe are “outrageous”, he adds.

“You wouldn’t put a product out that wasn’t safe ¬ you don’t dare compromise.” Baseler says: “When you resort to trying to get people to see [a competitor’s] product as being unsafe, you really have no other value in [your own] product.”

He says that its European rival raised the grandfather issue a decade ago when Boeing pursued a similar strategy with the Next Generation 737, and certificated it as an amendment to the earlier version of the twinjet. “That argument went away when we pointed out that some of its system certification requirements were to a later standard than the [Airbus] A320’s,” Baseler says.

Boeing says changes introduced on -8 “will be evaluated in co-operation with the regulatory authorities in compliance with the latest regulations” and it late last year received US Federal Aviation Administration approval for this plan.

The manufacturer is yet to be advised by the FAA as to whether it would be required to carry out a full evacuation demonstration of the 747-8, although the European Aviation Safety Agency has said that it will press for a demonstration in its discussions with the US regulator.

Baseler says he does not know what the likely seat count would be for the evacuation test.