Guardian of meeting global standards
Print Edition
HAO Lian might be called the “safety guardian” of the ARJ21 regional aircraft and the C919 single-aisle plane.
She is director of the Airworthiness Engineering Center at the Shanghai Aircraft Design and Research Institute of Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC). It’s her job to ensure that both aircraft obtain all required certification from Chinese and the international regulators before they begin commercial operation.
Pick up any single sentence from the more than 400 separate requirements listed in the No. 25 China Civil Aviation Regulations, and Hao can rattle off the page and the content of its provisions. A new aircraft can receive a Type Certification, or birth certificate, after all the boxes of requirements are ticked.
“The airworthiness certification process requires us to be extremely precise and meticulous since it relates to the life safety of future passengers,” said Hao.
Her team of about 58 engineers monitors the design and manufacturing processes of other departments in the institute as well as those of suppliers.
The team must verify that all parts and the entire aircraft once assembled meet all the specifications laid out by both Chinese and United States regulations.
That requires an aircraft to pass nine stringent measures adopted by Hao’s teaming, including various experiments, test flights and risk evaluation.
One stipulation, for example, requires an aircraft to be able to fly in sub-zero temperatures. To address that standard, Hao’s team transported a prototype of the ARJ21 to the city of Urumqi in the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region for a test flight in cold temperature conditions.
To meet another requirement, an evacuation test was conducted in September 2012 to ensure that all passengers and crew could exit a plane within a minute in an emergency landing. The first test failed after an inflatable slide failed to open, but the matter was remedied in a successful second test a week later.
“I think both of these domestically made aircraft are as reliable as Airbus and Boeing planes,” Hao said.
Hao, 51, was a newcomer to the field of aviation safety inspection when she left an administrative position at the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute after 25 years working there. She joined COMAC with her husband in 2008.
Since China has never domestically manufactured passenger jets in the past, it had little hands-on experience with airworthiness certification, Hao said.
The first Chinese regulations for Type Certification were simply translations from US Federal Aviation Administration standards. Hao said many clauses were hard to understand. That is changing now, with the regulations better geared to “Chinese elements,” she said.
“The ARJ21 and the C919 have given China a presence in international airworthiness certification,” Hao said.
US FAA officials now just witness the certification process alongside Hao’s team and agree to issue their certification along with that of Chinese regulators.
“I hope that the development of the ARJ21 and the C919 will eventually give China its own set of authoritative regulations before I retire,” she said.
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