HomeThe United States and Europe continue to work on a bilateral aviation safety agreement, but while they continue to make progress, final agreement continues to elude them.
Under the terms of the existing bilaterals between the United States and several of the European nations, the United States accepts most aircraft parts manufactured under the production approval of our bilateral partners. The European Community (EC) has interpreted those agreements such that generally all EC members countries will accept products manufactured under US production approval (so long as they meet the detailed requirements of at least one of the bilaterals).
In order to meet the requirements of European law, there is a need to replace the existing country-by-country bilateral situation with a single US-EC bilateral. Such a bilateral was thought to be ready to be signed last year, but a unilateral EASA decision to impose user fees was blamed for the delay in signing the Agreement – the user fees were deemed to be unfair to US companies seeking European validation of U.S. design approvals. Since then, it appears that other topics have kept the two airworthiness authorities from coming to another ‘final’ agreement.
The existing bilateral agreements also form the basis of the FAA-EASA program under which FAA employees perform inspections of EASA-145 repair stations located in the United States, which allows EASA to manage many more ASA-145 repair station in the US than it would otherwise be able to manage under existing staffing levels.
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