Originally Posted by
tdracer
Dave, we're probably debating minutia here, although I agree Fly is confusing type cert with the aircraft specific airworthiness certificate - what we always referred to as being 'ticketed'. An airworthiness certificate can not be issued if the aircraft is out of compliance with an existing AD (agreed, if the required compliance date is in the future, then the certificate can be granted based on a plan to comply by the compliance date). However since the corrective action for the MAX is (so far) undefined, compliance can not be shown hence no new production aircraft can be ticketed.
Unless something has changed since I retired, I do disagree about production flight testing normally being done on an experimental ticket - so long as the aircraft complied with the approved type design, they did normal production flight test under the production certificate. I ran into this because when we wanted to flight test something new - it wasn't per the type design so it needed an experimental ticket (and production always complained about the paperwork they needed to do to get the EX ticket) - at which time it became an experimental flight test, not production flight test (although we often did some production flight testing on our experimental flight tests). That being said, I suspect all the current MAX production flight testing is being done via experimental tickets since they can't be shown to be compliant with the existing AD.
Could it also be a special flight permit for certain flights?
Thought B1 flights out of Renton were on the exp cert anyway?