Airworthiness - Finding Your AD Schedule
A common complaint from members is that GFA no longer provides a set of Airworthiness Directives (ADs) with the Form 2 kits each year. A second complaint is that it is difficult to find the list of relevant ADs, also referred to as the AD Schedule, for your aircraft on the web page.
Significant legal changes were made in 1998 and in October 2009, EASA changed the international systems for airworthiness. Unfortunately, the GFA missed these changes. It wasn’t until a CASA audit in 2013 that we realised that there was a significant problem in the way we were doing our business.
In the past, GFA Airworthiness was receiving ADs from foreign countries and ‘rebadging’ the ADs under a GFA letterhead. This process has stopped as it was wasteful, could introduce errors and wasn’t legally compliant after October 2009, as the original AD from the country of manufacture now has legal precedence over the AD issued by GFA. This makes it very difficult for the GFA Airworthiness team to track all of the foreign ADs for all of the aircraft types registered in Australia. Compounding the issue are ADs issued by engine and propeller manufacturers, which are relevant to those with self launch or sustainer aircraft.
It is the legal responsibility of the Registered Operator (RO) to ensure that the ADs are complied with each year. To make it easier, the GFA Airworthiness team maintains a list of all known ADs and the aircraft types. While all effort is made to ensure that the schedule is as up to date as possible, the Registered Operator should still check with the type certificate holder’s web page, as the Registered Operator is legally responsible if anything is missed.
To find your AD schedule
(1) Go to the Gliding Australia web page
(2) Click on the Docs/Forms tab
(3) From the Documents list, click on Airworthiness
(4) Click on the first sub folder AD Schedules
This brings you to a page where you can download an Excel spreadsheet titled GFA AD-AN-AWA Register YYYY-MM-DD.xls. The spreadsheet is updated regularly and the date at the end of the file name gives the date when the file was last updated. There are reasonable instructions on how to use the spreadsheet on this page as well.
(5) Download the file “GFA AD-AN-AWA Register YYYY-MM-DD.xls” and open it.
When you open the file you may need to click on ‘Allow Editing’ depending on your security settings.
When the spreadsheet opens, you will see a number of column titles across the top of the worksheet.
(6) Click on the down arrow icon for ‘Type Certificate’ in column D. This pulls up a list of all of the aircraft, engine and prop types listed in the spreadsheet.
(7) Deselect the tick box in the list at Select All.
(8) Scroll down the list and find your aircraft, engine and prop type and click in the tick box as required.
This has now produced a filtered list of all of the ADs that GFA Airworthiness has knowledge about for the selected aircraft, engine and prop type. You can now find the GFA ADs from the ‘AW Directives’ folder (after Step 3 above instead of ‘AD Schedules’). You may also need to search the EASA or type certificate holder’s web page for the ADs listed in the schedule from those sources.
anthony smith
Chair
Airworthiness Department
