Type certification

A regulator's formal approval that an aircraft design meets all airworthiness standards, required before it can carry the public.

• In the US it comes from the FAA, in Europe from EASA; the design is certified once, then each aircraft built must conform to it.
• The applicant proves compliance with every requirement through analysis, lab tests and flight tests witnessed by the regulator.
• Catastrophic failure conditions must be shown to be 'extremely improbable', on the order of once per billion flight hours.
• Novel aircraft need new rules first, such as the FAA's 2024 'powered-lift' category for eVTOLs, and programmes routinely run years late.