International Partners Plan for Aviation Growth

The Certification Management Team (CMT), comprised of leaders from four civil aviation authorities, has published a strategy  to develop and implement policies that streamline certification. The team includes the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Agencia Nacional de Aviaҫão Civil (ANAC) of Brazil, European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), and Transport Canada Civil Aviation (TCCA). The FAA and EASA also have established a bilateral Validation Improvement Roadmap (VIR) that defines the specific bilateral initiatives.

The continued globalization of the aviation industry has prompted collaboration among the world’s civil aviation authorities to harmonize regulatory systems. Industry growth has increased the level of domestic certification activity, and validation projects from emerging States of Design are placing growing resource demands on other authorities. By maximizing the use of existing U.S. bilateral partnerships with our CMT partner countries, we can reduce the amount of effort all of the agencies currently expend on validation programs.

Strong partnerships are a key to consistent safety standards around the world. As leaders in the global aviation community, the CMT members are pioneering a strategy that focuses on confidence-building initiatives and risk-based validation principles to accept partner certification activities with limited or no technical involvement. This is a significant expansion of previous initiatives, which allows the authorities to maximize their reliance on the certificating authority as much as possible.

The CMT Strategy and the FAA-EASA VIR support the FAA’s Global Leadership Initiative, which is transforming how the FAA prioritizes and targets resources to engage with the international aviation community to improve safety, efficiency, and environmental sustainability through regulatory harmonization and partnerships.