How to buy engineering and certification services
In this category you are buying delegated authority as much as engineering hours. Read the delegation, its limitations and whose name ends up on the approval.
This is the parent guide for the firms that sell engineering work rather than hardware: certification and designated engineering representative services, STC and modification houses, design and stress engineering, flight test and test ranges, and research and technology development. Each has a leaf guide of its own. What they share, and what a buyer should read first, is the question of authority: whether the firm can make a finding that binds a regulator, or can only prepare the data somebody else will approve.
Delegation is a published thing, with edges
The regulations set out who may act for the Administrator. Designated engineering representatives are appointed by discipline, structural, powerplant, systems and equipment among them, and approve information within limits prescribed under the Administrator's general supervision, alongside designated manufacturing inspection representatives and designated airworthiness representatives.1 Organization Designation Authorization is the organisational version, and the same part governs its authorised functions, its unit personnel, its procedures manual, its limitations, its records and reports, and its duration.1 The FAA publishes the types: type certification, supplemental type certification, production certification, parts manufacturer approval, technical standard order authorisation, major repair alteration and airworthiness, air operator and airmen certification.2 Each type carries its own boundary. A type certification ODA holder may manage findings for a certification programme but may not issue an original or amended type certificate, and a supplemental type certification ODA is aimed at repair stations, operators and manufacturers, with consultant groups eligible where they have the knowledge and experience.2 Ask which delegation the firm holds, what its procedures manual lists as authorised functions, and what its limitations exclude. That last answer is where a project meets a surprise.
Europe is a separate purchase
An approval granted in the United States does not travel by itself. Design organisation approvals in Europe are granted under Commission Regulation (EU) 748/2012, and the agency also publishes an alternative procedure for organisations whose scope does not warrant a full approval.3 If your product is going to a European operator, ask early who holds a design organisation approval, whose it is, and what a validation project costs and takes. The same question applies in reverse for a European supplier selling into the United States.
What you are actually contracting for
Fix the deliverable, not the effort. A certification plan, a compliance checklist, a test plan, analysis reports, an instructions for continued airworthiness supplement and the approval itself are separate deliverables with separate acceptance criteria. Settle who owns the certification data and the resulting approval: the applicant, or the consultant who will then license it back. Settle what happens if the regulator asks for a test nobody quoted. For government-funded work, remember the administrative floor: an entity doing federal business registers in the government's own system and holds a unique entity identifier, and that registration is checkable before you contract.4
Questions that sort firms
Ask for the delegation, its scope and its limitations, in writing. Ask who personally will make the findings and how many projects that person is running. Ask for two projects of the same class, and what the regulator asked for that was not in the plan. Ask what the firm does when the schedule slips: who absorbs the cost, and who tells the customer.
The companies below are listed on public facts, each with its source linked.
Sources, in the order cited
- 1Electronic Code of Federal Regulations · 14 CFR Part 183, Representatives of the Administrator
- 2Federal Aviation Administration · Types of Organization Designation Authorizations
- 3European Union Aviation Safety Agency · Design organisations and design organisation approvals
- 4United States General Services Administration · SAM.gov, federal entity registration and contracting