When you think of milestones you usually think of things like first flight, certification, first delivery of the 100th airplane—that’s one that airplane makers really like. But Flight Design, the German company that has built more S-LSAs than anyone, celebrated an achievement that doesn’t get talked about much.
The company hosted a group of American regulators for a three-day audit of its facilities in Kamenz, Germany, and, no, the visiting feds weren’t from the IRS but from the FAA. In the LSA world, an audit is a less formal approach to checking on compliance with the regs than certification, but it’s still a very real and important step. While LSAs are certified under what are known as ASTM standards, a set of self-regulated rules, which the industry comes up with and decides to abide by, the FAA has in recent years taken to doing audits to check that manufacturers are sticking to those standards. No huge surprise that in a crowded market with many small players, a number of them weren’t.
Flight Design, on the other hand, made the announcement to let its customers know that it had passed the audit, no doubt because it’s proud of its processes. The FAA audit, in fact, wasn’t Flight Designs first time at the regulatory rodeo. It has participated in LSA compliance programs with authorities from the UK, EASA, China and Germany.
Flight Design has other big milestones coming up. It plans to certify a four-seat transportation airplane, the C4, over the next couple of years, hopefully under a rewritten and greatly liberalized Part 23, once the FAA gets around to making that happen, that is. The new Part 23, interestingly, will borrow heavily from the successful Light Sport category and the industry standards and common sense safety approaches its creators developed.
