MEL's
We do use the MEL, but the big difference betwen corporate and airline is that airlines have large departments and resources to "taylor" their MEL's to their operation. Corporates do not have this luxury, so broadly depend on the MMEL. The MMEL is generic and cannot cater for the myriad of defeciencies that may occur and generally only deal with the larger and more obvious items.
We had a specific problem a few month ago. An aircraft was in base mintenance and just as it was coming out to go on service an engineer broke a radio master switch ( it was stuck ON!). The simply "fix" was to pull that radio master switch CB thus taking out the switch and all you had to do was turn ON/OFF the radios individually. Because operation with an U/S masterswitch was not mentioned in the MEL (probably because it was an optional item) the engineer would not release the aircraft to service. It was Friday evening and it took a long time to track someone down in the CAA for an alleviation. Now if this defect had manifested itself away from base, in the middle of Africa, middle of the night and at a weekend; what is the correct course of action? Yes. of course, we would cancel an £80,000 charter and give the money back and fly home empty, 2 days later with an alleviation and fully serviceable radios.
I think some big airlines have in house authority from the CAA to issue alleviations
to operate outside the MEL, is this correct? What is needed is a 24 hour CAA hot line in order that items not mentioned in the MEL can be considered for MEL'ing.