What is an STC ODA?
By Bob Miller, Director, Certification ODA Administrator, Springfield, Ill., and Dallas, Texas
If you want any equipment installed on your aircraft that requires a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC), StandardAero’s STC Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program can save you time and money, especially when it comes to aircraft downtime.
How? The answer starts with the challenge — the aviation industry’s needs far exceed the FAA’s resources. In fact, a 1993 report by the General Accounting Office showed that the FAA’s certification work had increased five-fold in the previous 50 years. With new, sophisticated technology coming to all types of aircraft, the workload continues to grow every day.
The FAA needed a way to delegate certain tasks so that they could focus their limited resources on more critical areas. To accommodate the increasing demand and streamline the certification process, the FAA adopted the ODA program, delegating more functions related to aircraft certification, as well as new functions pertaining to certification and authorization of airmen, operators and air agencies.
Without an ODA, the FAA reviews your project and may place it into a “national pool” of all STC projects being worked on in the country. It then prioritizes and assigns your project to an Aircraft Certification Office that has time to work on it. With local policies in effect, each office may handle the STC process differently from what you may be used to. Due to the FAA’s limited resources, your project may take up to six months or more, not including the time to actually engineer, install and certify your equipment.
How does our STC ODA status benefit you?
As an FAA-designated ODA, StandardAero is allowed to act on the FAA’s behalf to “help” them with their job. To gain ODA status, we wrote, and the FAA approved, a procedures manual that describes how we process the STC paperwork. The FAA audits us yearly to ensure we’re adhering to the procedures in our manual.
As an ODA, StandardAero manages your STC project from start to finish with very little involvement from the FAA. After submitting a certification plan to the FAA and receiving their approval, we are in control of the project. It continues on our schedule, not the FAA’s.
Unlike the FAA, we work weekends, federal holidays and whatever hours it takes to complete the job within your timeframe, dramatically reducing aircraft downtime by weeks or even months. At StandardAero, we are your single point of contact for your STC. You never have to contact the FAA to find out how your project is progressing. We keep you informed every step of the way.