Non-certified aircraft working group formed

The first CARAC meeting of the New Year was held in Ottawa on January 10-11. The event was a CARAC Part V Maintenance and Manufacturing (M&M) Technical Committee meeting.
There were many important personal aviation issues on the agenda.
The most critical issue was the formation of a working group to study non-certified aircraft.
Canada currently has five categories of non-certified aircraft: basic ultralights, advanced ultralights, amateur-builts, owner-maintenance and limited class.
There are many overlaps in these classes and in some cases an identical aircraft can be put in three or four of the five possible categories, with totally different rules for equipment, maintenance and operational limitations, including passengers.
Many of the resulting rules (some can carry passengers and some can’t, some require helmets to be worn and some don’t) are due to historical reasons and don’t necessarily make much sense today.
More recently three new categories have been proposed for Canada to allow aircraft currently being produced that can’t be flown in Canada to be owned and flown by Canadians.
These include U.S. Light Sport Aircraft, the Light Aircraft Manufacturers Association of Canada (LAMAC) proposed 4,000 lbs., six seat, non-certified, manufactured “personal aircraft” and some new turbine, pressurized, six seat amateur-built kits, like the Epic LT, which weighs 7,040 lbs. and does not fit into the current Canadian amateur-built category.
In these days of shrinking staff, Transport Canada (TC) didn’t want to administer another three categories of aircraft and instead formed the working group with the aviation industry to look at the possibility of combining some or all the existing and proposed categories, plus forecast future aircraft.
The task will be complex and the reporting timeline is short, but the working group does have a great advantage.
It has 14 members who are some of the best minds in the country in the area of personal aviation.
The group includes representatives of EAA-Canadian Council, RAA, UPAC, The Canadian Federation of AME Associations, LAMAC, Epic Aircraft, Transport Canada (M&M, Aircraft Certification and Recreational Aviation and Special Flight Operations Directorates).
The working group will be co-chaired by TC’s Brian Whitehead and COPA’s Adam Hunt.
This working group will start meeting in February 2006 and will aim to present a final report with recommendations to the Technical Committee by October 2006. It will be a very busy 2006 for those involved in this task!
The Technical Committee also dealt with many other issues during the two day meeting.
The highlights included TC introducing a new Commercial Small Operator Maintenance Control Manual as a ready-made and approved manual. This will become part of CAR standard 726.08.
This new manual will allow commercial operators who have three or fewer, small, non-turbine powered aircraft used for air taxi, aerial work or flight training to just adopt the pro-forma manual and not have to write one from scratch for their operation.
This should make life easier for these operators and flying schools.
The advantages to flying schools should be good for personal aviation.
TC also introduced a proposed CAR amendment that will compel all aircraft that are flown in airspace where transponders are required to have their altimeters calibrated every two years.
Currently the calibration of altimeters is only required if aircraft are flown IFR or in Class “B” airspace.
COPA initially opposed this requirement as an unjustified expense to our members, however, during the long debate in the meeting it came to light that CAR Standard 571 Appendix F requires all aircraft that have mode “C” altitude encoders must have them calibrated to match the aircraft altimeter. This ensures the altitude the pilot sees is the same as that seen on radar by ATC.
The problem is that unless these aircraft are flown IFR or in Class “B” airspace they are never required to have the altimeter calibrated.
This would mean that an accurate encoder could be adjusted to match an un-calibrated and possibly very inaccurate altimeter.
The end result is that both the encoder and altimeter would be equally inaccurate.
When the aircraft was flown at an ATC assigned altitude the pilot and controller would both think that the aircraft was at the right altitude – only opposite direction traffic would discover that it wasn’t.
In light of this problem in the regulations COPA withdrew its objections.
Once the new standard becomes law all aircraft that are flown in transponder airspace will require altimeter calibrations every two years along with the existing requirement to have Mode “C” encoders calibrated.
At the end of the meeting the Executive Director, Don Sherritt, announced that TCHQ has had recent staff reductions and is undergoing reorganization.
The M&M policy office has lost one third of their staff and these positions have been eliminated.
At the same time Sherritt has been given additional responsibilities as Executive Director of Part VII Commercial Air Services.
This all adds up to more work and fewer staff to do it. Sherritt announced that TC would not attempt to “do more with less” as this just leads to poorer quality work and staff burnout.
Instead they will do “less with less” and this will result in fewer CARAC meetings and fewer changes to the CARs in the future.