Originally Posted by Affirmatron
Ghengis
The TP/FTE schools spend a lot of time focussing on safety and risk mitigation, as well as running trials and understanding the procurement process. By completing a recognised course at a recognised school they gain professional standing and credibility, in the same way a doctor or solicitor does. Legal and medical training takes a long time and is expensive, which is why some practices chose to make use of secretaries and nurses to do some of the work, but they would never allow them to do ALL the work.
If an aircraft company choses to use 'unqualified' or 'unaccredited' TPs/FTEs, surely they're just overrated secretaries/nurses making out they're solicitors/doctors!
It's a fair argument, but ignores that there isn't a standard qualification or accreditation available to a lot of people.
Going back to my previous example, all of those non-graduate TPs working for Scaled composites for example are pretty universally regarded as being amongst the best in the flight test profession - despite a lack of formal "accreditation" as TPs. They certainly aren't overrated people pretending to be something they're not.
For that matter virtually all FT departments have some damned good FTEs who may or may not hold an engineering degree / CEng / PEng, but their real ability comes from starting at the bottom and learning on their way up, within a very competently managed framework.
And, whilst from the outside (or for somebody who has graduated from a TPS and can't understand why their new boss didn't!) this looks odd - the fact is it works.
Maybe there's scope for some form of universal TP/FTE licence collecting up all of the many routes to professional practice. Maybe it exists in Membership of the SETP and SFTE? But to mandate that, would it do anything but restrict the flexibility of organisations that are managing quite competently already?
G