The first legal guidelines were passed in the United states to regulate civil aviation in the 1920’s. Of particular importance was the Air Commerce Act 1926, which required pilots and aircraft to be subjected to testing and licensed, for incidents to be properly investigated, and for the establishment of safety principles and navigation supports, under the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) repair stations specialize in evaluating and the maintenance of pneumatic parts for commercial, business and military aircraft. Operating advanced machines designed to meet the high-quality benchmarks of the FAA and the airline industry, the repair stations are able to identify and repair equipment to the standards recognized by the OEMs.
Retaining correctly repaired items on the aircraft might not involve critical parts. But just like a chain, the weakest links can bring it all down. Aircraft parts can be broken in a variety of different ways. Some of the more frequent causes can be lightning, engine failure, metal fatigue, delamination, fire, bird strikes, ground damage and of course, human factors. Metal fatigue and delamination as well as the other destruction causing examples are great opportunities for FAA repair stations to promptly repair the damaged items restoring them to their high operational specifications.
With cooling turbines/starters/PDU’s FAA repair stations can setup test cells to check air turbine starters, air cycle machines/cooling turbines and PDU’s from the smaller corporate/commuter types through the newest generation of wide body commercial aircraft. With seperate computerized test consoles located outside of the test cell, housing all guages and controls allows the technicians to maintain highly precise measurement. Electrically Driven Fans, Motors & Auxiliary Components can be subjected to testing in additional test cells that are setup to test AC and DC electrically driven fans, motors and other electrical accessories. Finally, valves are normally tested yet again in another test cell containing a valve test console, universal valve test stand and high-flow altitude chamber for pneumatic valve testing at less than ambient pressures. This cell contains all controls for low (105 PSI) and high pressure (350 PSI) air and vacuum.
The National Transportation Safety Board (2006) accounts 1.3 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles for travel by car, and 1.7 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles for travel by air. These are not passenger miles. If an airplane has 100 people, then the passenger miles are 100 times higher, producing the risk 100 times lower. These are just a few of the procedures that repair stations take into account when repairing and retooling aircraft equipment. This level of quality and administration allows us to with confidence state that air travel is the most secure in terms of deaths per passenger mile.
