Aviation Regulations and Project Management: Developing a New System for an Aircraft Piston Engine

Engineering, Project, and Production Management

EPPM 2015 Conference Papers

Aviation Regulations and Project Management: Developing a New System for an Aircraft Piston Engine

Jacek Czarnigowski¹, and Agata Czarnigowska²

¹Professor, Department of Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics and Aviation Propulsion Systems, Politechnika Lubelska, Nadbystrzycka 40, 20-618 Lublin, Poland, Tel: +48-81-5384744, Fax: +48-81- 5384749, E-mail: j.czarnigowski@pollub.pl.
² Assistant Professor, Department of Construction Methods and Management, Politechnika Lubelska, Nadbystrzycka 40, 20-618 Lublin, Poland, Tel: +48-81-5384440, Fax: +48-81-5384648, E-mail: a.czarnigowska@pollub.pl.

Abstract:International civil aviation regulations affect every aspect of development of new aircraft systems. On the one hand, the procedures are comprehensive and clearly defined, on the other hand they are complex and costly to implement. Possibly for this reason, and quite surprisingly, civil aviation is far from being in the avant-garde of innovation. The paper is a case study. It presents lessons learned in the course of a project aimed at developing a new fuel injection system for an existing piston engine. The main difficulty was not creating a new system, but fulfilling the requirements of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certification process related with changing the type certificate so the engine equipped with the new system could be used in practice. The effect of the aviation regulations on the project scope, structure of the project team, schedule and budget has been described together with the set of project-specific risks.

Keywords:aircraft certification, civil aviation, innovation, project management, project risks.