What is EASA and AD?
As directly quoted from the official website, EASA (The European Aviation Safety Agency)’s mission is to promote the highest common standards of safety and environmental protection in civil aviation. The Agency develops common safety and environmental rules at the European level.
Rulemaking is drafting aviation safety legislation and providing technical advice to the European Commission and to the Member States. Airworthiness Directive (AD), a type of the safety legislation, is a legally enforceable regulation issued by the agency to correct an unsafe condition in a product. The product can be an aircraft, engine, propeller, or appliance.
Let’s take a quick look at the 13 years since the foundation of EASA;
An Important Forenote:
This is not a scientific study. A general summary prepared using rough statistical data. All data is based on ADs released on EASA’s original site since 2007. The types and models of aircraft were based on the types and models labeled in the ADs issued by EASA. Data is based on Type Certificate holders without separation of aircraft, helicopters, systems or equipment.
So, what happened since 2007?
EASA has issued a total of 6718 AD. The distribution and annual average of these published ADs by years are as follows;
Of the 6718 published AD, 39% (2619) belong to Airbus and Boeing products only.
We see an increasing trend for Airbus, while relatively decreasing/stable trend for Boeing. Of course, the quantity and trend is also related to total aircraft delivered by each manufacturer. Boeing has a significant experience and quantity difference compare to Airbus.
Engine manufacturers (PW, CFM, GE, RR and IAE) have a total of 573 AD with a share of 7.5%. When we evaluate the two values together, we see that a total of 3192 AD, meaning EASA AD-publishing team have spent half of its time (46.5%) for only Airbus and Boeing products.
With this assessment we cannot conclude whether any aircraft type or model is more reliable than the other. For this type of data, the total number of aircraft flying and total flight hours should be taken into account. There are professional platforms that carry out these studies meticulously. We just wanted to present some enlightening figures in terms of authority and an idea of its impact on the market.
In our next article we will go into more details. We hope that we have added a different perspective on the authority aspect of the aviation industry.
https://ad.easa.europa.eu/
https://www.airbus.com/
https://www.boeing.com/