STATEMENT OF THOMAS E. McSWEENY, DIRECTOR, AIRCRAFT CERTIFICATION SERVICE, FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION, BEFORE THE HOUSE SCIENCE COMMITTEE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY, CONCERNING THE FASTENER QUALITY ACT. MAY 7, 1998.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and Members of the Subcommittee.

I welcome the opportunity to testify today on the Fastener Quality Act (FQA) and on the question of whether Congress should recognize the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as the sole authority responsible for the proprietary fasteners manufactured under FAA oversight. As Director of the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service, I am responsible for the FAA’s program to ensure that aircraft, aircraft engines and their associated components meet the FAA’s strict design and production requirements. Our primary mission is to enhance and promote aviation safety. I would like to outline briefly for the Committee what our program involves and how we, along with our colleagues from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the Department of Commerce, propose to avoid any duplication of effort in this area. I will defer to my colleague, Mr. Kammer, who is here today from NIST, to provide the Committee with details about the FQA.

Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) applicable to airplane and engine manufacture are published at title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 21, Production Certification Regulations. We have a comprehensive system for approving product designs and production systems before aircraft components or parts may enter service, including proprietary fasteners designed for use in the U.S. civil aviation industry. Our regulations include, among other things, requirements for quality assurance, conformity of products and parts to their approved designs, supplier control, parts marking and traceability, and record keeping. Under this system, FAA engineers perform reviews of product design to assure compliance to established standards. Many of these engineering reviews include functional and destructive testing for safety and reliability. Once the FAA approves a design for an aircraft part, including fasteners, we require the manufacturer to establish and maintain a production and quality control system that will ensure the production of conforming duplicates. These production systems must provide quality assurance over all aspects of the manufacturer’s production organization, including the approval of their laboratories.

The FAA’s involvement does not end there. After the design and production approvals are completed, and certified, the FAA also monitors a manufacturer’s continuing production through regular surveillance and periodic formal audits under the Aircraft Certification Systems Evaluation Program (ACSEP). Our regular surveillance involves scheduled and unscheduled inspections by FAA aviation safety inspectors and aerospace engineers of production activities by manufacturers and their suppliers. This oversight may take the form of in-plant residency or scheduled or unscheduled on-site visits. We also currently have 176 aviation safety inspectors. The ACSEP teams and these inspectors conduct approximately 125,000 inspections annually during these on site visits. Each manufacturer has a portion of their production system audited at least annually by an aviation safety inspector. Our ACSEP audit cycle is from 24 to 48 months, meaning that we evaluate the entire manufacturer’s production system every two to four years. This cycle can be shorter if more frequent inspections are suggested by information we receive about a product’s performance. Evaluations are quite thorough and may, for example, last up to fifteen days and involve as many as eleven inspectors. Each year we conduct an average of 470 ACSEP audits.

Under this safety system, the FAA regulates proprietary fasteners that are specifically designed and manufactured for use in aircraft or their associated components. This assures fastener safety at a level necessary for their use in state-of-the-art airplanes and engines. Our system is somewhat different from the system established by NIST under the Fastener Quality Act, which is intended to apply to fasteners used in a wide variety of industries and applications. For example, FQA only establishes requirements for inspection and the certification of laboratories, while under our regulations, the FAA looks at the design, production and continued airworthiness of the product in a highly defined environment—that of the civil aviation system. While different, the FAA system clearly meets the safety intent of the FQA.

The FAA strongly supports the FQA and our colleagues at NIST, with whom we have a productive working relationship. We believe FQA is an extremely valuable means of protecting the public by ensuring that standard fasteners used in a wide variety of applications, including civil aircraft and engines, meet the applicable standards set for those fasteners. At the same time, we wish to avoid unnecessary duplication of government oversight and regulation and the burden that duplicate systems would impose on manufacturers of proprietary fasteners. That burden could translate into additional time and financial costs on industry without any added safety benefits. Accordingly, the FAA would support a legislative clarification that proprietary fasteners that are specifically designed and manufactured under FAA-approved production systems, would be deemed to be in compliance with the FQA. We have worked with NIST on specific statutory language to accomplish this, which NIST has provided to the Committee in its statement.

Madam Chair, I believe we all share the common goal of enhancing aviation safety programs, but we also wish to eliminate undue burdens on industry because of unnecessary, dual government regulation and oversight. In the case of proprietary fasteners designed for use in aviation, the FAA’s regulations provide the necessary safety oversight.

That concludes my prepared remarks. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.