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Building N530JY
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Date: 8-3-2020
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Number of Hours: 0.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Why an RV-10? part 3
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(continued from previous)
wrenches or doing paperwork. And that’s if they find time for you at all.
Obviously this process is important in commercial operations. No one wants to find out at 37,000 feet that the airline to which they’ve entrusted their safety installed a bunch of non-STC’d USB chargers that they didn’t test, and now the plane is incapable of navigation. But the risk calculation is not the same if I’m flying my Lance to Chicago to get some groceries. Risk is a combination of impact and likelihood; even if my Lance did experience electromagnetic interference, the impact would be minuscule compared to an airliner. I’d just look out the window and land, assuming I even noticed it all. I can’t do that in the airplanes I fly at work.
The third option is for an owner to just install something on his or her own. This would often be trivial to do, but it isn’t legal and there wouldn’t be any supporting paperwork. The airplane would thus be unlikely to pass a required annual inspection and, without documentation, would lose resale value.
This all begs the question of why, if the risk calculation is so different for the type of flying I do for fun and the type I do for work, both are subject to the same regulatory hurdles. It’s kind of like comparing the rules for commercial trucking to the rules for operating an ATV.
Enter the experimental aircraft. Fortunately for people like me, the FAA decided in the 1950s that experimental aircraft weren’t subject to the same rules. Under modern FAA regulations, “experimental” includes a number of subcategories including amateur-built aircraft. Anyone who does at least 51% of the work constructing an aircraft can be designated a “repairman” for that specific aircraft by the FAA.
This means that builders of experimental aircraft are authorized to maintain their own aircraft even though they aren’t FAA-certified mechanics. It also means that builders can modify their
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Formation in the Lance
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