The U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General (OIG) is conducting an audit to check if the FAA is consistently applying its rules for Supplemental Type Certificates (STCs), as required by the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024.
This should be interesting. The OIG should delve even deeper and check on field approvals as well. I know my local FSDO won’t do field approvals at all any more.
Too much liability on the inspector who approves the data.
I wonder if this was spawned by 100UL.
Maybe Swift is mad because their PAPI money didnt buy them blanket approval without the necessary data.
Maybe the OIG thinks the aviation community has it too good and the FAA is running low on red tape.
Cynical, ain’t I?
Liability issue is a valid one if it was applied equally among all of the FSDO’s. Unfortunately that is not the case. I can point out many instances of pt91 owners FSDO shopping to find one who would do a field approval. Even pt 135 time and duty rules are interpreted differently depending on what FSDO your in. Until OIG opens their eyes and sees this nothing will change at the FAA.
It has nothing to do with the individual FSDOs, but rather the individual inspectors. In the not-so-distant past there have been inspectors that were held individually liable for mishaps that occurred after a field approved installation in which the approved data was found to be a contributing factor. This spawned a jump in professional liability insurance policy purchases by airworthiness inspectors who feared being sued individually for simply doing their job. And what followed was a trend of inspectors just refusing to perform field approvals altogether. Compounding the issue is that the inspector force has shrank to a fraction of what it was only ten years ago and the specialized knowledge required for many field approvals just isn’t there anymore in the FSDOs. Or if it is, an applicant has to wait until that inspector is available. Which is why an applicant that has the financial resources is better off obtaining a designee.
My local FSDO told me that, when he received initial training at OKC, the opening comment in the class was, “Welcome to FSDO, 87 independently owned and operated offices.”
When I completed AF training in the T-39a (Sabreliner 40) back in the 70s I was told that it was considered a Center Line Thrust airplane in the St Louis office. When I returned to my duty station in NW Florida, the local FSDO removed the restriction.
I never paid for a rating until 2022 when I got a Sport Pilot signoff for my gyroplane. The FAA doesn’t seem to do check rides any more.
FSDOs have nothing to do with STCs. This audit is on the STC process and the consistency between ACOs (aircraft certification offices).
They should audit the process in general. Too many ACOs make up their own rules even though the regulations are already in place. I was involved in a two blade fixed pitch prop STC and they were making us test to the higher standard of a 4 blade propeller. When I questioned why the higher standard the engineer said because he said so. I have never seen bureaucracy run so amuck as I did in this project. People wonder why STCs are so expensive. The STC’d prop cost twice as much as the experimental version and they are exactly the same however the cost of certification is being recouped on the STC’s version.
Is that a Freudian slip, or merely a typo?
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