Military Airworthiness

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Member States Civil Aviation Authorities is are responsible for developing and maintaining the regulatory framework that ensures that all civil aircraft within Europe are airworthy and safe. This legal framework arising from the convention of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) is detailed in EU regulations. For national sovereignty reasons, military and state operated aircraft (e.g. police, coastguard) are exempted from this legislation. Each Member State is therefore individually responsible for ensuring through their own domestic regulations that the military and state aircraft they operate are airworthy and can be flown safely. The result of this is that each EU Member State has developed its own unique national military airworthiness regulations for overseeing their military aircraft. This has resulted in little commonality between the Member States' military airworthiness regulations which leads to barriers to achieving Pooling & Sharing opportunities in the military aviation domain.