Opinion: Today’s Standards Will Serve Tomorrow’s Aerospace Technology

Every person born in 2025 belongs to “Generation Beta.” These children—and everyone born through 2039—will be part of the future workforce for every industry (including those emerging and not yet imagined), and they will surely use new “generations” of equipment, tools and resources for supporting intergalactic aerospace.

The aviation industry can be overly deliberate in incorporating advancing technology. The “emerging” tech on an airframe often has spent years at work on the ground, but embracing opportunities for new hardware or software requires a reminder of how it has been done all along.

The “how” is through performance-based regulations. Those standards, which describe basic outcomes for humans to achieve rather than prescribing the steps taken along the way, are flexible. They can be used to embrace “new-gen” engines or a “first-gen” airframe or the Wright Flyer. For maintenance, the standard is “at least [an] original or properly altered condition.” That wording goes back to the Civil Aviation Regulations: Long before the current organization of the Code of Federal Regulations, CAR §18.30 set this “Standard of Performance”:

(a) Maintenance and repair. All maintenance and repair shall be accomplished in such a manner and the materials used shall be of such quality and strength that the condition of the part of the aircraft on which such work has been performed shall, with regard to aerodynamic and mechanical function, structural strength, resistance to vibration and deterioration, and other qualities affecting airworthiness, be at least equivalent to its original or properly altered condition.

The elegance of this standard withstands the test of time. Its origin precedes the operation of a U.S.-manufactured jetliner, and its implementation will outlast the life­span of any aerospace vehicle in service today. By relying on performance-based rules, existing schemes can flex and expand for every technology.

For every human generation that will design, manufacture, operate and maintain advanced (and advancing) equipment, the performance-based requirement for maintenance remains. The industry has gone from reciprocating engines to jet turbines under those same standards of performance, and there is no reason it cannot handle every “generation” to come.

Brett Levanto is vice president of operations at Obadal, Filler, MacLeod & Klein, managing firm and client communications in conjunction with regulatory and legislative policy initiatives. He provides strategic and logistical support for the Aeronautical Repair Station Association.