What is the correct reference date for accomplishment of a maintenance task including AD required actions?

This question comes up regularly on Technical Record Reviews and a colleague of ours answered it perfectly today by means of a data driven answer and not an opinion, the answer can be found as FAQ no. 19496 on the EASA website.

For any maintenance task, including AD required actions, the date of release is the date when the Certificate of Release to Service (CRS) is signed by duly authorised certifying staff. Only certifying staff is competent to make the final airworthiness determination and therefore the CRS reference date does not necessarily coincide with the date when the individual maintenance task was actually performed and signed off by maintenance staff.

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The Open Item List – OIL

During a review of an aircraft, we will consider many different aspects of the records and aircraft configuration.

During the review we will have queries and concerns regarding discrepancies in the records we review.

This means we need a way for the lessee (returning or starting a lease on the aircraft) and the lessor to communicate and satisfy the queries and concerns.

For this we use what is called an OIL – Open Item List or similar.

This is basically a spreadsheet with multiple tabs regarding each of the different review aspects; for example (AD, SB/MOD/STC, Components HT, Components OCCM, Engines #, APU, Landing Gear, Repair File, Physical Observations etc.

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Component Traceability for Life Limited Parts (LLP)

When an item is considered to be a Life Limited Part it means that the item has a limit which forms a part of the initial design.

Once the life limit is reached then the item is no longer considered to be serviceable and as such will require removal form the aircraft.

Some items can have multiple limits applicable to them such as some engine components; and others such as a part of a landing gear may only have one limit.

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Maintenance Reserves

Maintenance Reserves are monthly payments made by the airline to the lessor. The payments are often referred to as “Supplemental Rent” and belong to the lessor. The accumulation of the funds is used to cover the costs of scheduled major maintenance events on Airframe, Landing Gear, Engines and APU. The table in our illustration gives an idea of typical MRF rates for a B737NG with CFM 56 engines installed.

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Awareness of an Aircraft’s AMP (Aircraft Maintenance Programme) Sources

The AMP is a specific maintenance plan for any particular aircraft. When the document is created there are many different sources for us to consider.

We have mentioned in prior post’s about how certain MPD (Maintenance Planning Data) thresholds / intervals can be changed in an AMP depending on factors such as environment, regulatory body, reliability etc.

There are also multiple additional sources for the AMP that are important considerations while the MPD forms a core section of the AMP. What we need to consider is further ICA’s (Instructions for Continued Airworthiness) that might apply for our aircraft.

For example, over time the aircraft may get damaged and as such have repairs; the repair in turn will have an ICA associated which may impact your aircraft; additionally, AD’s (Airworthiness Directives) where repeat inspections apply could also form a part of the AMP.

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