It is an interesting point: what is the fundamental reason for a GM and an AMC?
Why does the FAA not have these?
My view is that this shows the more prescriptive nature of European aviation regulation.
Now try to look at the benefits, or disadvantages.
One benefit is that a lot more stuff is written down, which enables those to take the time to study the rules to stay within the law, whereas in the US system there are more grey areas, and everybody knows that while a lot of A&Ps are keen to do Minor Alterations, equally a lot of A&Ps won’t/can’t read the regs and are afraid of using their judgement. Literacy was never a strong point for aircraft mechanics anywhere, however, and 500 pages is just as much a barrier as 2000 pages.
Clearly, one effect of this is that, in Europe, it enables those who are clever and know the details of the rules to use this to their commercial advantage. For example if an avionics installer is really very sharp in the Minor Mod regime, he can do a lot of jobs as Minor mods, and do stuff which most people would not believe is at all possible without an STC/etc. The client may pay a lot of money for the supporting documentation, so that fact that it is a Minor mod is not worth as much as one might think, however.
Peter wrote:
what is the fundamental reason for a GM and an AMC?
I think this structure serves a useful purpose:
- The regulations are the prescriptive part
- The AMC present one possible way to comply with these regulations (i.e. feel free to invent your own if you can)
- The GM are clarifications to the regulations, which by themselves have no prescriptive force
As to the sheer size of the regulations, one of the reasons is the existence of two tiers: each Part contains a Section A aimed at mere mortals, and Section B aimed at the national CAAs.
Peter wrote:
It is an interesting point: what is the fundamental reason for a GM and an AMC?
Why does the FAA not have these?
(US-)FAA also has something like AMCs! It’s called “advisory circular”. These are, however, not as neatly organized as in EASA-World (where you basically have 1-2 AMC-Documents for every regulatory document) but there are hundreds of them organized around specific topics and you have to make sure yourself that you find all relevant ACs for your question…
On GM, the reason is even more simple: The FAA doesn’t need them as it is regulator and CAA in one organization. Therefore there is simply no need for the regulatory part of the FAA to write GMs for the administrating part. In EASA-World GM is mainly made for the national CAAs to help them understand how to locally implement the regulation.
Yes, European aviation regulation would be much easier if we would get rid of local authorities in all EASA member states and would upgrade EASA to a single European CAA. But do we want this?
An earlier decision made 30 Nov 2016 with relevance to posts 11 & 14 is C(2016)7654/F1: Commission Decision on refusing permission to the United Kingdom to grant an exemption from certain substantive requirements laid down in Commission Regulation (EU) No 923/2012 (pdf link). local copy
Peter wrote:
It is an interesting point: what is the fundamental reason for a GM and an AMC?
It is probably done that way out of necessity. While federal law in the US applies to one country and has been developed for 200 years, EU law is a new construction forced down upon a number of historically independent sovereign countries. AMC allows for individual national solutions in cases where 1) it makes sense (e.g. training syllabi), or 2) no agreement about a common hard law has been possible (e.g. VMC minimums and VFR night flight rules). It also makes for some flexibility in the law-making process, requiring hard law to go through the top of the EU bureaucracy, while AMC/GMs are quietly developed by the specialists in EASA after the hard law gets the stamp.
GM is just a public notebook from EASA. It ranges from explaining concepts, clarifying interpretation, to very operational matters like the visibility requirements for instrument approaches (GM4 NCO.OP.110). (Even our national AAIB had not noticed this low status when I mentioned it to them a couple of years ago – pre-EASA-OPS it was national hard law.)
I think the arrangement makes much sense in principle. However, to the users it is a nightmare of complexity. Implementing rules (IR, hard law) and AMC/GM have quite different formats and are practically impossible to combine in a way that ensures that you have the latest complete editions of both. To make up for that, EASA has developed the Easy Access versions, which combine IR with AMC/GM, but they are not updated with every EU-reg update, so although a great help, they are not strictly current. In the end, maintaining the complete and current picture of any part of aviation law in the EU is, in effect, very nearly impossible.
A smaller problem is that while hard law is, by EU principle, translated into every formal language used in the EU, AMC/GMs are not. For that reason, and because the translations contain errors, I do not think any translated version of EU aviation hard law should ever be used. It would make any cross-referencing between hard law and AMC/GM even more difficult than it is already.
huv wrote:
For that reason, and because the translations contain errors, I do not think any translated version of EU aviation hard law should ever be used.
This is indeed a big problem. The Swedish CAA says that they consider the English language versions authoritative. If there should be a court case here I’m 99% sure the courts would only consider the Swedish version. If a case should go to the EU court, then who knows what will happen.
