Proposed Part 21 amendments including restricted category certification of foreign non-civil aircraft (CD 2514MS)

Policy proposal

The proposed amendment to Regulation 21.025 of the Civil Aviation Safety Regulations 1998 (CASR) would remove the references to certain sovereign states and empower the Part 21 Manual of Standards (MOS) to define criteria for making an application. The criteria cover areas such as aircraft design, configuration data, critical part identification, and records of service and maintenance history.

A consequential change will also be required to regulation 21.185 of CASR to ensure a special certificate of airworthiness can be issued for these aircraft.

The prevailing assessment of the aircraft against the airworthiness criteria, and ultimately the decision to grant a type certificate is unchanged. The criteria added to the Part 21 MOS gives potential applicants greater ability to determine whether the available data for a given aircraft is likely to be sufficient to satisfy the criteria for the issue of a type certificate.

Policy aim

The aim of this proposed policy change is to increase the demographic of aircraft that are eligible to apply for a type certificate in the restricted category for special purpose operations. This will allow Australian operators to access alternative aircraft types for certain special purpose operations where the airworthiness of the aircraft is determined on empirical data.