Airworthiness calculator

My friend and new CFI Doug Downey sent me a link to Nathan Hodell’s (of wifiCFI) handy Airworthiness Calculator.

A significant part of becoming a pilot and especially of becoming a CFI is learning your way around the Federal Aviation Regulations or FAR, Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations. Adding to that, certain requirements are scattered around the FAR rather than being all in one section or paragraph. One example of such a distributed list of requirements are those related to airworthiness, whether the aircraft is safe and legal to fly.

Before committing aviation, a responsible pilot will want to know whether the airplane is airworthy. Even for a private-pilot practical test or “checkride,” the examiner will certainly quiz the candidate on knowledge of airworthiness requirements by running through at least a hypothetical scenario. That’s the best case. The candidate is required to provide an aircraft for the checkride, and if the examiner discovers or suspects that said aircraft is not airworthy, the scenario is now real and in the candidate’s face with the substantial checkride fee on the line. A friendly examiner may prod the candidate with leading questions to help uncover the embarrassing mistake and request a discontinuance, which means immediately halting the checkride to be resumed at a later date. (This is a pause button, not a failure.) However, if the examiner starts out or becomes sufficiently annoyed that the candidate is oblivious to having already flown an unairworthy aircraft to a checkride, the examiner is within rights to fail the candidate and likely also to have a stern word with the recommending CFI.

For a sampling of what pilots get to deal with, let’s consider a few items. Happily for pilots, FAR 61.3 does list all documents the pilot is required to have readily accessible regarding qualification to fly: pilot certificate, government-issued identification, and medical certification. (FAR 61 deals with airman certification.)

But, FAR 91.203 requires certain documents to be on board the aircraft pertaining to its condition, not the pilot’s. The memory aid for this (of which aviation has many) is ARROW: Airworthiness certificate, Registration certificate, Radio operator’s permit (not required in the U.S.), Operating handbook, and Weight & balance calculation. (FAR 91 covers “rules of the air” for General Aviation.)

The pilot is responsible for determining that mandatory inspections have been documented in the maintenance records. It is common for airplanes to have not one but three logbooks: one each for the airframe, engine, and propeller. The memory aid here is AAV1ATE: Annual, Airworthiness directives, 100-hour inspection if flown for hire (e.g., rental aircraft), VOR check if flying under IFR, Altimeter, Transponder, and Emergency locator transponder inspections. These are likewise in separate FAR sections and have different maximum intervals.

Different flight rules and conditions have different required equipment; these are all in FAR 91.205, which I remember as in “I may be traveling to another part of Alabama where the area code is 205.” The memory aid for day VFR is the ridiculous ATOMATOFLAMES, and good luck keeping all the As and Os and Ts straight in your head. Night VFR is a much more manageable FLAPS. The requirements in the FAR are the essentials. The manufacturer of an aircraft may add to the 91.205 requirements but not take away.

As if that were not enough, the pilot also has to properly deal with inoperative equipment, covered in FAR 91.213 (“unlucky”).

Despite its volume, the foregoing is not exhaustive, so be grateful that Nathan shared his highly useful Airworthiness Calculator with the world and make regular use of it.