The authority to maintain our own aircraft is a valued privilege for amateur builders, but it carries important legal responsibilities. Having built an aircraft, in some cases many years ago, does not ensure that the holder of the maintenance authority is up to the job today. The SAAA Maintenance Procedures Course is approved by CASA to enable all who hold maintenance authority for their amateur built experimental aircraft, the required knowledge and current obligations to meet their responsibilities associated with the authority.
Many of our older members built aircraft under the Amateur Built Aircraft Acceptance system (ABAA) which did not give them any maintenance capability. The SOAG group in Queensland, who until recently operate ABAA built aircraft, approached CASA some years ago to obtain maintenance capability similar to that for experimental amateur built (EAB) aircraft. CASA agreed with the concept provided they completed a course designed to meet the requirements of the CASA Basic Airworthiness Administration Syllabus plus demonstrating practical maintenance competence.
This course has been given freely to SAAA by SOAG. This provides great value to SAAA members, not only in helping our ABAA member builders to obtain maintenance authority, but also to educate all EAB builders and owners. Builders of EAB category aircraft must convince the Authorised Person (AP) who issues their CoA that they are capable of ‘continuous maintenance’ of their aircraft. Experience since the introduction of the EAB category has shown that many may be less than competent for this task.
With the MPC now available, new CoA applicants as well as existing maintainers, can demonstrate their competency by successful completion of this course and the final exam and obtaining the course certificate.
Advantages of the course.
The SAAA encourages builders to do this course for their own benefit. With knowledge of the regulations builders and owners will:
CASA approval.
The trainers, are CASA approved. The course and the governing procedures manual have been approved by CASA. The current experimental instrument WIll be changed to add the privilege of self maintenance to ABAA builders. We hope this will be a stepping stone to the eventual introduction of a maintenance authority course which will allow non builders or second-hand owners of an ABAA or an Experimental aircraft to maintain their aircraft to some degree.
Participant fees.
There is a great deal of time, cost and effort involved in developing and trialling the course, training the presenters and staging the courses around Australia. These days there is no free lunch so there must be a cost recovery to attend the course and receive your course certificate on graduation.
As with the CoA pack the cost will be adjusted to take account of years of membership. This rewards those that support the system who have been contributing to the SAAA over a period of time.
All prices include GST. All participants must be a member of SAAA.
Who should attend?
How to apply;
Contact the SAAA head office
mpc@saaa.com
PH 02 68897777
State Coordinators;
SAAA has set up State Maintenance Coordinators to coordinate the course and locally manage the program. They will liaise with local Chapter Presidents, TC’s and interested individuals in each Chapter who can assist with local program arrangements. Remember this is your Association and the more that you can do to help the more capability to the members.
The four Coordinators are:
Click here download the application form.