CIVIRES Blog
Insights, updates, and best practices for airworthiness certification management.
The Lease Return That Stalled on an STC Revision
How STC revisions, work packages and ICA held by three separate organisations can stall an aircraft redelivery, even when everyone kept correct records
When the Damage Is Outside SRM Limits: Where Repair Turnaround Is Really Loste
In heavy checks, repair data turnaround is usually lost in the handover between the Part 145 and the design organisation, not in the engineering
The Real Price Tag on an STC Isn't the Fee
For most STC applicants, the borrowed prototype aircraft slot, not engineering hours, is what decides schedule and margin
The ICA are not the Last Chapter of an STC Type Investigation
Why instructions for continued airworthiness belong in the STC design phase, not after it, and what late ICA costs the operator's CAMO.
From Test Rig to Compliance Matrix: Where Equipment Manufacturers Lose Time
Ahead of the Aerospace Test & Development Show 2026, a look at why qualification test evidence so often lags behind the compliance matrix it's meant to support.
What a Type Certificate Transfer Really Reveals About Your Compliance Data
TC transfers and DOA restructures are rare — which is exactly why most organisations don't know whether their compliance data would survive one.
Why Reusing an STC on a New Host Aircraft Is Never "Just Paperwork"
Reusing an STC package on a different host aircraft can quietly change the applicable certification basis — here's why copy-paste compliance is a myth.
Six Months Into Part-IS: What It Really Exposed About Compliance Data
A six-month retrospective on EASA's Part-IS deadline — for many DOAs it wasn't a cybersecurity problem, it was a compliance-infrastructure problem in disguise.
ETSO Authorisations as Datasets, not Certificates
Why treating an ETSO authorisation as a one-off filed certificate, rather than a living dataset, catches up with equipment manufacturers eventually.
Work Order or Requirement? The Traceability Test Most MRO Teams Haven't Run
A quick test for MRO and airline teams: can you trace a major repair back to the certification requirement it satisfies, not just the approving work order?
SEPIAC is gone. The Certification Platform fixes only half the problem.
The new EASA Certification Platform replaces SEPIAC with structured data and workflow automation on the authority side. Are you ready at yours?
The Most Expensive Undocumented Decision in Modification Approval: Minor vs Major Classification
Why the minor/major classification call on STC and modification programmes is high-stakes, hard to defend later, and rarely captured as structured evidence.
EASA Amendment 18: What the Latest Part 21 Update Means for DOA Compliance Data
A look at EASA's Amendment 18 update to the Part 21 AMC/GM and what it can mean for DOAs linking occurrence reports to design compliance evidence
EASA Certification Platform Follow-Up
A question worth asking now that the EASA Certification Platform is live
EASA Platform Follow-Up
What the Architecture of the EASA Certification Platform tells us
The requirements change chain reaction
Maintaining requirements in sync should be automated!
One Part, Many Compliance Stories
Equipment suppliers feed evidence up to multiple TC/STC holders, each wanting it their way — turning one part into a version-control challenge.
The Requirement That Moved
When a requirement changes, manual re-linking is where traceability quietly breaks — usually surfacing at the worst possible moment.
Inside the PLM, or Beside It?
The PLM owns your design data but wasn't built to demonstrate airworthiness compliance — so compliance lives beside it and references in.
Tracking Isn't Demonstrating
Knowing a document exists is not the same as demonstrating a requirement is met, yet many "compliance systems" only do the first.
The invisible budget line
The hidden cost of certification isn't the effort — it's that your most senior people spend it re-linking evidence by hand..
The Matrix Is Not a Deliverable? Or is it?
A compliance matrix works best as a live structure you build from day one, not a report assembled at the end.
Read It or Reconstruct It?
Compliance status should be something you can read in a moment, not something one person has to rebuild before every review. Right?
TC programme complexity requires appropriate tools to be managed
TC programmes are too large and cross-disciplinary for any one person to track compliance manually, so CIVIRES links programme-level and requirement-level views in a single system where status updates propagate automatically.
The Compliance Strategy Conversation
Establishing a sound, traceable and connected compliance strategy at the beginning f a programme enhance qualities and lowers risks.
The Picture Between the Disciplines: Why Programme Reviews Fail to Show Where You Actually Are
Programme reviews rarely reveal true status because that status lives in the cross-discipline relationships only one or two people can mentally assemble—a fragility that live compliance infrastructure solves by delivering the integrated picture to everyone before the meeting even starts.
AI and the single source of truth
The single surce of truth becomes easily accessible if a proper structure is in place. And then AI becomes a real multiplicator for the entire process. Not just for searching information.
Your Certification Basis Has a Life-Cycle. Does Your Software Know That?
The certification basis isn't a static list — it's a negotiated, evolving object. When it lives only in a document, disconnects hide until the worst possible moment.
Compliance Infrastructure
Compliance infrastructure isn't a documentation system or a status-tracking tool - it's both. Live. In one system. As a single source of truth
A Type Certificate is a family
Maintaining live compliance status across products can open up many possibilities
EASA is replacing SEPIAC
EASA is moving from a document based approach (SharePoint) to a workflow-centric approach to certification projects
AI in the certification domain
AI will not save your certification programme. Structure will.
On-the-point and fast status reporting requires appropriate single source of truth
Certification status update should take 30 mins — in most design offices it takes half a day, because the data was never structured to give an integrated picture in the first place.
The engineer who knows where everything is
Every DOA has one person who carries the real compliance picture in their head — and that is not a people problem, it is a structural one.
DOA resilience is rooted in the right compliance infrastructure
Compliance is a demonstrated outcome, not a prescribed method — and the organisations that find audits routine are the ones that can prove it quickly thanks to their infrastructure, not just engineered it well.
EASA increases visibility of Part-26 Mandates
EASA's reference lists are useful tools for (S)TC holders managing design changes — but the more important question is: does your software tool for certification genuinely digitalises your certification process, or just moves the paperwork online?
Why Compliance Matrices Become Outdated (And What It Costs You)
Your Excel compliance matrix was accurate once. Then design changes came, authority comments arrived, and six months later it's a snapshot of the past, not the present. The silent drift that puts your certification at risk.
The Mental Burden of Running Certification Programmes
Certification engineers develop a mental inventory of unresolved tasks. But when programme complexity exceeds what one mind can manage, critical details get forgotten. Here's the hidden cost of manual tracking.
Why Excel Fails for Certification Management
Excel spreadsheets have been the backbone of many DOA offices for decades. But as certification complexity grows, the cracks are showing. Here's why it's time to move on.
Bidirectional Linking: The Feature That Changes Everything
Automatic bidirectional linking between requirements and documents is the core innovation in CIVIRES. Here's how it works and why it matters for your DOA.
From Purchase to Productive Use in 6 Weeks
Enterprise PLM systems take years to deploy. CIVIRES takes weeks. Here's our proven 6-week deployment roadmap for SME Design Organisations.