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In which EASA country is an on condition Engine/Prop allowed?

Which NAAs? It’s EU law… no „gold plating“ allowed.

always learning
LO__, Austria

vee-tail wrote:

No engine on condition in France …. at least not for my Limbach engine which has to be overhauled at 1000 hours. The wood prop however has no TBO or calender life, so presumably can continue indefinitely on condition.

The french regs allowed for our Cirrus a maximum 2 × 10% extension – we reached 2400hr and then overhauled the engine.

EDL*, Germany

Snoopy wrote:

Which NAAs? It’s EU law… no „gold plating“ allowed.

Unfortunately not that easy: 2.1d of 965/2012 says that commercial operations is every flight agains renumeration. Doesn’t state that flight training is an exception. That opens the way for some NAAs to say that the rules are at least contradicting and they stay on the safe side.

Germany

A new “issue” popped up: Engine recently reached the max lifetime of 144 months. Was extended by maintenance company until November with agreement by FOCA (called BAZL in Switzerland). Let’s see what the maintenance guy/CAMO says today.

Switzerland

HBadger wrote:

Let’s see what the maintenance guy/CAMO says today.

It’s perhaps a stupid question, but isn’t there a maintenance program for the plane that exactly says what happens in such cases? It’s kind of weird that these questions come up after limits are reached.

Germany

Bathman wrote:

EASA say flying instruction isn’t a commercial operation. However some NAA ignore this and say it is.

They do say that flying instruction isn’t commercial ops, on the other hand aircraft operated by commercial A/DTOs have additional maintenance requirements compared to non-commercial ops in general.

I doubt that NAAs can claim that flying instruction is commercial ops, but they can claim that all A/DTOs are commercial. AFAIU, that’s the view of the UK CAA.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

The problem is, that EASA is doing a realy crappy job on getting this „commercial“ thing sorted out. Basic regulation is crystal clear but somehow not what people actually want.
Therefore there is lot of exceptions and changing of that in the detailled rules leading to the absurd situation that a specific flight could be non commercial from ops point of view but commercial from maintenance and somthing in between in terms of operator organization and required licenses – I guess depending on time of year, moon phase and shoe size of the pilot. And I‘ve not yet started about taxation and customs…

It‘s hard to blame any national NAA that tries to create sense in that nightmare of regulations.

Germany

The basic problem is that there are as many factions within a single NAA as there are warlords in Somalia.

You get the ex military types who tend to go for the hardest rules (never had to be personally responsible for maintaining a plane, and anyway it was always done to a high standard) who are probably supported by the new “safety” types with MBAs in risk management. Then you get the (few) who participate in GA at some level who are more realistic, but most of these will be no more than renters; to own and maintain a plane and go places takes a bit of money and time and you aren’t going to look for a CAA job. Then you get those who go out and inspect maintenance and who are occassionally horrified at what they see, but they can’t just bust half the industry… And all the time there is pressure from the industry to maintain the revenue stream but obviously this is not done openly. There has been a strong tendency for “schools/clubs” to maintain at an absolute minimum level and this will be known to all those in the system, but they can’t say it openly.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

The problem is the EASA regs are written in a way that the expert at the NAA (ex Royal Navy 31 years) can interpret them in a manner that they know best. What EASA needs to do is write them in a manner that there is no room for (mis)interpretation.

@malibuflyer
Basic Reg 2.1 says

commercial air transport (CAT) operation’ means an aircraft operation to transport passengers, cargo or mail for remun­eration or other valuable consideration;

Flight training is not CAT. It’s NCO.

Commercial ATO/DTO require a CAMO (controlled maintenance environment), but that doesn’t say anything about TBO extensions. The CAMO approves the AMP including any extensions. Nothing any CAA can do about it.

A EASA reg non CAT private plane (SEP etc..) does not have have any restrictions on TBO.

Anyway, very interesting to hear the different experiences in different EASA countries under what are identical rules. Keep them coming please.

always learning
LO__, Austria
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