Quote:
Originally Posted by TonyT
That is modifications, NOT construction techniques which is how the Airframe is put together.

ok then, Spitfires assembled with AN rivets, does that count?

I can only speak of the ones I know, and they use British hardware in repairs and construction. End of the day legally speaking, if the rivets have been replaced with none approved AN items the Aircraft is unairworthy……

for more information see

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/20100607Draft4.pdf

Have you ever thought why there is no aircraft manufacturing [Airbus/helicopter sub contracting excepted] in the UK????

The world has moved on from the CAA ideas on most things…

Airbus actually fought through the changes that brought about EASA and in a way rightly so.
At the time a 737 operated in the US might not have been acceptable in different Countries across the world as certain items on the aircraft would be not approved in those Countries, the brake packs that have operated for hundreds of thousands of hours in the US fleets may not have been accepted in say the UK, necessitating a design change for the UK, like wise Germany might have not accepted a aircon pack design, France a seat design, Holland a toilet design….
This was clearly stupid and would have meant Airbus designing and producing several different items for different nations and when these were sold to other countries they would need to be replaced or modified to meet that counties legal requiremnts, clearly a common standard of A320 A330 etc needed to be adopted to allow Airbus to compete, hence EASA…….. After all a German Aircraft would fly in UK airspace and vise versa, and neither would fall out of the sky considering they both had different specs……………That is the good bit.

Bad part of of all this was that to Standardise all European Countries into one agency you need to standardise the quality of the countries aviation authorities.. sounds simple, BUT to bring all countries up to say the German or UK CAA standards ( some of the best in the world at the time) is hard to do in a time period, so all of the countries were dumbed down to the lowest standard with the hope that they would all rise together…….. might sound good, but I sat amending manuals and throwing out literally books full of Airworthiness directives that had been written to address safety issues……. not what one would call a clever move really, however we are still here and they haven’t been dropping out of the sky like flies, so it appears to have worked…. which brings me back to

I am not saying that the CAA approach is ideal in all circumstances but from their point of view it is probably the most expedient particularly as vintage aircraft represent a very small part of the CAA workload.

Actually if you remove EASA work from the equation, most of the pure CAA work in Annex 2 aircraft is actually Warbirds and Vintage types, as we as said above no longer tend to build new aircraft, so we no longer have design authority for any new types as such in the UK which would fall under the CAA’s remit.

WJ244 you hit the nail in one 🙂

Fascinating discussion.