Avionics News September 2021 - 42

THE VIEW FROM WASHINGTON
Continued from page 17
administrator for review and acceptance. This is where
the establishment and adoption of performance-based
safety standards becomes challenging.
It is easy to do what we have done, what we are
comfortable with. Think about your commute to work.
Do you travel the same roads? Or the services you
utilize. Do you go to the same store or the same petrol
station? Edgar Rice Burroughs once wrote, " We are, all
of us, creatures of habit, and when the seeming necessity
for schooling ourselves in new ways ceases to exist, we
fall naturally and easily into the manner and customs
which long usage has implanted ineradicably within us. "
When it comes to how we certify things, we are
most comfortable using the means of compliance we
are most comfortable with. If we continue to do what
we have always done, we fail to truly implement
the objects and goals of the safety continuum and
the objective of amendment 64 of Part 23. There are
two elements (or persons) in every demonstration of
regulations compliance: the applicant and the authority.
The authority also is comfortable with what they know,
what they are familiar with, and what is already deemed
to be acceptable. It is infinitely easier to just do what
everyone is comfortable with.
However, and this is the important " however, " we
don't have to!
The regulations fully support the offering of " other
means of compliance. " The applicant always has had
the option of proposing an alternative to the established
and accepted means. But it is not always easy and
almost guaranteed to be time-consuming. The local
representative of the authority seldom has the authority
to accept an alternate means of compliance that has not
already been reviewed and accepted.
For the past few decades, industry has been
demanding consistency in regulatory matters, pushing
legislatures to require regulatory consistency. As a
result, the authorities have pushed for " consistency "
from their employees as they interact and oversee
industry. This push for consistency has truly pushed
the industry into a prescriptive approach to compliance
with the regulations by encouraging simple compliance
with the established guidance materials - doing what we
always have done.
The quest for consistency has often been interpreted
as standardization. While they are related, they
42 avionics news * september 2021
are distinctively not the same. As a note, this is
not a discussion about the FAA's Consistency and
Standardization Initiative. Under the CSI, when someone
(called a stakeholder) disagrees with a decision from an
FAA inspector or engineer, the stakeholder may escalate
the disagreement up the chain of command to the
FAA employee's manager where the manager reviews
the decision and may communicate directly with the
stakeholder to resolve the issue. If that doesn't work,
the stakeholder continues up the chain of command to
the field office manager with specific documentation
supporting the stakeholder's position.
For our purposes, this discussion is about breaking
from transition and suggesting something different.
The FAA AC states that a means of compliance
must set forth an acceptable manner by which an
applicant can comply with specific provisions of the
specific regulation. The means of compliance must,
as a minimum, meet the safety intent of the specific
regulation(s) it references and maintain the level of
safety established by the regulation.
For repair stations, this means showing how an
alternative means of compliance meets established
quality standards in other safety-related industries or
the quality management systems defined in consensus
standards. In the case of the certification of products,
proposing standards used elsewhere in aviation is always
a good option. Finding established standards from other
industries is a solid option, as are standards used in the
other government agencies or the military.
If you don't want to follow the path we have always
followed, and if you want to be innovative and suggest a
new and novel approach to the regulations, guidance and
policy support you. But just because you have proposed
a different path doesn't mean it will automatically be
accepted. If you are not using an already established
means of compliance, you need to thoroughly develop
your approach and present how it meets the intended
level of safety, and then present it to the authority for
review and acceptance. Most importantly, you must
prepare yourself for the time commitment.
Everything pushes us to continue to do what we
always have done, to be creatures of habit. In many
cases, industry best practices are just that, practices
that have been developed and perfected over the eight
decades or so that established aviation regulations have
existed. However, when the establishment no longer
supports your business model or your new products,
push for a new acceptable means of compliance. q
Avionics News September 2021

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