Hands up how many of you fly PZL aircraft?
Put your hand down if you have a T&B fitted.
Hmmm... no change in raised hands.
OK, how many of you know that your aircraft has been technically
illegally flying in Australia the whole time?
Ahh..... no hands up.
Yeah, so... my club got audited last Christmas, and they were thorough!
Grabbed the TCDS for our Jantar and low and behold, the T&B is listed as
part of the minimum equipment list - thus a mandatory instrument for
that type. We went back through the history of our glider (IZU) and all
the sister ships that came in that batch for the Benalla worlds - none
ever arrived in the country with one. Then we looked at other PZL
gliders that we could find (Juniors, Puchacz etc). All have the T&B
listed, except for the 55. Uh oh....
That put the GFA in a tight spot as technically we cannot alter the
minimum equipment lists required for type certification when we accept
them from another country. And we have plenty of 30 year old Jantars
that have been through a Form 2 every single year and never been pulled
up on that (not to mention newer and older PZL aircraft all in the same
boat). Thankfully we have a couple of guys up there that not only know
the rules, but found some creative phrasing to put us all back in the
good books with CASA for a clearly ridiculous situation. A yaw string is
now an acceptable substitute for a T&B in your glider as part of the MEL :)
Read another way - if your yaw string comes off in mid flight, you're
now flying an "experimental" aircraft. Weeeeee!
So, a new PU list has come out today that gets us out of the legal
problem of not meeting the minimum equipment list.
http://doc.glidingaustralia.org/index.php?option=com_docman&view=list&slug=schedule-of-permissible-unserviceabilities&Itemid=101&layout=treetable
Also clarifies that you are allowed to disconnect the CG release and not
have to perform AD177 on it if you only ever aerotow. There's a few
other minor tweaks in there.
As the last person to sign off the Form 2 for this aircraft before the
audit, this whole episode was rather interesting to me for many
different reasons, particularly watching the internals of the GFA
airworthiness system have a collective Oh Shit moment as we dug into it.
Learnt a lot - and thankfully still have my inspector rating!
Anyway, enjoy flying your now legal PZL aircraft! :P
--
Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/
Java 3D Graphics Information http://www.j3d.org/
LinkedIn http://au.linkedin.com/in/justincouch/
G+ WetMorgoth
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"Look through the lens, and the light breaks down into many lights.
Turn it or move it, and a new set of arrangements appears... is it
a single light or many lights, lights that one must know how to
distinguish, recognise and appreciate? Is it one light with many
frames or one frame for many lights?" -Subcomandante Marcos
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