"In a phone interview with journalists, the company's head of sales Yugo Fukuhara says the Mitsubishi MRJ regional jet is the first aircraft to fully apply the US FAA's organisational delegation authorisation (ODA) system, which came into effect in 2009. The ODA was partly applied to the Boeing 787 programme when Boeing was delegated some responsibilities for performing tests to show that the aircraft's lithium-ion battery complied with airworthiness requirements.
Under the ODA system, Mitsubishi is delegated the authority to design, test and analyse procedures and test results to show airworthiness requirements. This means that it also has to invest significant time and resources to develop the required processes.
"With this new system, all design and manufacturing internal processes must be documented in advance and approved by the authorities. We need to build new processes to validate compliance not only for ourselves, but also for all our component partners," says Fukuhara. "Our partners are aware of this new system, but we have to integrate their old system into our new processes, and this needs a long time.""