Correctly Format Your PMA Supplement

How have you formatted your PMA Supplements?

Most PMA applicants provide a draft PMA Supplement to the FAA in Word format in order to facilitate the PMA process. Even though the PMA Supplement is technically an FAA obligation, the applicant does this to facilitate the process of reviewing and issuing the approval. I have heard from FAA offices that some draft supplements are in a row format, like this:

Article Name	Article Number	Approved Replacement for Article Number	Approval Basis and Approved Design Data	Make/TCH Eligibility	Model /Series Eligibility
ARTICLE ###### ###### Identicality per DATA … MAKE eligibility … MODEL eligibility
ARTICLE ###### ###### Identicality per DATA … MAKE eligibility … MODEL eligibility

This example above has the data in a row, but the data is not separated by column (as it would be in a table format).

FAA policy explains that when drafting a PMA Supplement:

Use this MS Word table format where each article name and number occupies a separate row. Do not delete or add extra fields, rows, or columns to separate data. [emphasis added]

Parts Manufacturer Approval Procedures, FAA Order 8110.42D chg 1 (09/15/2017)

 

From the guidance you can see that the FAA intends the data to be formatted in a table, with rows and columns.

Article Name	Article Number	Approved Replacement for Article Number	Approval Basis and Approved Design Data	Make/TCH Eligibility	Model/ Series Eligibility
ARTICLE	#######	######	Identicality per DATA	MAKE	MODEL
ARTICLE	######	######	Identicality per DATA	MAKE	MODEL

 

If the applicant submits the data in the wrong format, then the FAA office has to reformat the data so that the PMA Supplement matches FAA policy.

We have been working with the FAA to improve the guidance available to the industry, and the FAA will soon be providing additional guidance on this, but you can start helping the process TODAY by formatting your PMA Supplement in a table format (with columns), rather than in a mere row format.