Airworthiness requirements and the squawk decision

What this lesson is for: a student walks up to you holding a squawk and wants to know if they can fly. You need an answer, a reason, and a process you can run on a defect you have never seen before.

There are two ways to get this wrong and one of them looks safe. Launching a broken airplane is the obvious failure. Grounding a legally airworthy one is the other, and it costs your student their lesson, costs the school an airplane, and teaches everyone around you that airworthiness is a mood.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation III, Task B.
• From live eCFR: 91.7, 91.203, 91.205, 91.213, 91.405, 91.407, 91.409, 91.417.
• 91.213(d) twice. It is a sequence, and you are going to teach it as one.

Deliverable: Write out the 91.213(d) decision process as numbered steps, in your own words, on one page. Then apply it to one defect you have personally found on a preflight, and say what you decided at the time and whether you would decide the same way now.

1. The pilot in command's responsibility for airworthiness, which is not delegable.
2. Documents required on board.
3. Required instruments and equipment.
4. Required inspections: annual, 100-hour, transponder, altimeter and static, ELT.
5. Maintenance records and airworthiness directives.
6. The 91.213 decision process, step by step.
7. A squawk scenario that ends in no-go.
8. A squawk scenario that ends in go.
9. You teach the process, and decide a third scenario you have not seen.

• Teach the decision process as a sequence somebody could run without you.
• Watch two scenarios worked all the way through, one to each answer.
• Decide a third one, unseen, and defend it.
• If your answer is no-go, offer the student something that still lets them fly.

1. You teach the 91.213 decision process as a repeatable sequence, not a list of examples, for about ten minutes.
2. You decide an unseen third scenario and state your reasoning in the order the regulation sets, reaching a defensible go or no-go.
3. Where your decision is no-go, you offer an alternative that lets the student fly or makes clear when they can.
4. You distinguish the regulatory threshold from North Aero's threshold, and say which one is driving your decision.
5. You do not ground a legally airworthy aircraft without saying that is what you are doing, and why.
6. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

• Grounding everything. It feels like the conservative choice and it is not a decision, it is an avoidance of one. You will be asked what it cost.
• Memorizing which defects are acceptable. You will be handed one that is not on your list.
• Jumping to "is it required equipment" without running the sequence. The sequence exists because the answer is not always where you expect.
• Deciding first and finding the regulation afterwards. Students notice this faster than you would think.
• Not knowing whether your threshold is North Aero's or the FAA's. You must be able to say.
• Saying no and stopping there. Your student still wants to fly today. What can they do?
• Being talked round by a keen student. It rarely happens through argument. It happens through tone, over about ninety seconds, and you will hear it on your own recording.

Not applicable. Ground lesson.

This lesson has no Video Slots.