Airworthiness for Transport Category Aircraft

Assignment: Continuing Airworthiness Principles and Compliance

You are the Continuing Airworthiness Manager (CAM) of the Continuing Airworthiness Management Organisation (CAMO) of a Registered Operator that has a large and diverse fleet of Transport Category aircraft. The CAM 0 Quality Manager calls you urgently and advises that it has been found that a required Airworthiness Directive (AD) has not been incorporated into one of your aircraft. The aircraft in question is currently undergoing a maintenance check by your contracted approved maintenance organisation and this deficiency was discovered this morning when a general scheduled audit was being performed on this aircraft.

It has been confirmed that the AD should have been incorporated on this aircraft some time ago, however this is the only information available at this early stage. As the root cause of this airworthiness non-compliance has not yet been identified it is not known if other aircraft in the fleet may be similarly affected.

You must act promptly to ensure the safety of the fleet and to be able to assure your superiors and the National Aviation Authority that you have this in hand so the rest of the fleet does not have to be grounded. Consequently you put into place several investigation teams to act in parallel, looking at the different areas where a breakdown in change management and airworthiness compliance could have occurred. This should enable prompt identification of the root cause of this deficiency; provide an understanding of how it came to occur; whether it could have affected other aircraft in the fleet and if so what actions are needed to address the fleet situation; and to ensure there is no recurrence.

As the CAM you are very aware of the CAM O's Responsibilities - for which you are accountable - and for the critical importance of robust change management and aircraft configuration control. You assign each investigation team to review a different CAMO Responsibility area Take each of these teams, one at a ti me, and describe the instructions that you would provide to them to focus their attention on what they need to look for in their assigned Responsibility area and describe the nature of each of the investigations that they should conduct.

This assignment should be 1300 to 1500 words (any references and appendices would be in addition to this)

You may use the Harvard, APA or Oxford (Footnote/Bibliography) referencing system, but choose one and stay with it. Note that this includes any (brief) quotations or references to Course Notes which must be appropriately cited.

Required

You need to identify each of the CAMO Responsibility areas and explain how you would brief your teams to focus their attention on what they need to look for in each of those areas; and describe the nature of each of the investigations that they should conduct. As with the first assignment, this is another potential real-world situation that you could encounter in your career. With a maximum wordcount of 1500, each area will have to be concisely covered and I am seeking to establish if you have a good understanding of these responsibilities and how they would be acquitted in the context of this investigation.

Also it is important to read and fully understand all aspects of the question before you launch into researching and writing. A good rule of thumb is to: 1) read & absorb the question and, after some thinking time; 2) re-read the question to ensure that you appreciate the full extent of what is being asked; and finally perhaps after thinking about it further for a day or so: 3) read the question again! In Assignment #1 a number of you have answered the first part of the question (explain the regulatory structure etc) quite well but then treated the second part (the embedded concepts that would reassure the Board) too lightly.