Military Airworthiness Authority

He recommended a new Military Airworthiness Authority (MAA), with clearly identified Airworthiness Duty Holders , to bring coherence, governance, and responsibility. The MAA was estabhshed in April 2010. 

Military airworthiness authorities have generally not established acceptable levels of safety for technical failures. However, a higher risk level is generally considered acceptable for military aviation and a factor of 10 is often used when comparing acceptable accident rates for equivalent military and civilian aircraft types. Therefore, a probability of occurrence in the order of 10 per hour for a catastrophic severity effect for individual systems on a military transport category aircraft type (equivalent to a civil aircraft type) is often considered reasonable and achievable. See Appendix B for more information. 

Military Handbook (MIL-HDBK)-516B, Airworthiness Certification, DoD Handbook, delineates the U.S. military aircraft airworthiness certification process. It also contains a list of the typical certification data required for airworthiness certification, which leads to a flight clearance. It includes a section on system safety, a system safety program (SSP), and a software safety program (SwSP). System safety generally provides the safety evaluation of hardware and software for airworthiness flight clearance recommendations. System safety is involved in ensuring that the Aircraft Airworthiness Authority s standards are satisfied for the airworthiness authority involved. 

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