Originally Posted by
megan
Assume Australia in its wisdom knew more than the manufacturer.
It sort of made sense in the 1950s and did have some resemblance to today. It was a standard format (like GAMA)
It was all approved. It overrode data in the POH, but the POH was still used for checklists etc (like approved and unapproved data in current flight manuals)
It had just basic limitations and some honest performance data and a list of what placards. It converted US gallons to imp gallons and mph to kts. Most importantly weight and balance info for some aircraft was woeful, and it did fix that with a decent W&B section
The problem was it hung around too long - 10 years too long. DCA was not proactive in saying to manufacturers put the limitations and placards into this format and give us some honest performance and get the marketting weight and balance out of manuals. and we'll approve that bit. DCA could have been up there with GAMA in that respect. In the 1970's the GA industry moved away from backs of envelopes and scraps of paper into full blown usable and useful documents. Meanwhile DCA trudged along (it was said that if the doors to DCA buildings were inadvertently locked from the outside, nobody would notice until the lease ran out). The methods that DCA used to produce performance charts were (and still are) widely used around the globe .... but they wouldn't trust manufacturers to use them.