US airworthiness regulations for new aircraft under 19 seats will transition by next August to a new set of rules that give manufacturers more flexibility in showing compliance for emerging technology that improves safety or performance, Federal Aviation Administrator Michael Huerta announces on 16 December.
The transition begins after the White House approved on 9 December the first comprehensive rewrite of the Part 23 regulations for business and general aviation since 1957, the year that section of the Federal Aviation Regulations became effective.
The new rules set up a new framework for approving new technologies as airworthy. Instead a set of highly prescriptive regulations, the rewrite recasts the Part 23 rules as a set of performance standards, leaving it up to industry to prove to the FAA how their technologies comply.
The rewrite is intended to make it possible to introduce technology in new aircraft that didn’t exist when the Part 23 regulations were adopted. Before the rewrite takes effect, the FAA managed new technology by exemption, which requires a lengthy process to establish a “special condition”. As the rewrite takes effect, manufacturers have the option of showing how a new technology meets the same airworthy criteria.
Manufacturers don’t expect the rewritten regulations to lead to new aircraft design proposals overnight. Simon Caldecott, chief executive of Piper Aircraft and chairman of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, believes it will take at least a year after regulations take effect next August to see new technology at the airframe level.
In the meantime, the transition to the rewritten Part 23 is expected to unleash a flood of new avionics technologies. A quirk of existing regulations make it easier to retrofit new electronics on older aircraft than to certificate the same technology on a new aircraft. The industry has received approvals to install such safety-enhancing hardware as envelope protection systems, autopilots and angle of attack indicators in older aircraft. Those same systems are now expected to become available in aircraft delivered from the production line, leveraging the same compliance procedures developed for the retrofit projects.
The Aircraft Electronics Association calls the rewrite approval “a significant breakthrough and looks forward to the expansion of these philosophies into rotorcraft as well as transport category aircraft, where appropriate”.
Speaking to journalists on 16 December, FAA administrator Huerta says the Part 23 rewrite will serve as a template for expanding the standards-based regulatory philosophy into other parts of aviation.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
