AAR Corp. hosted Jackie Black, division manager for aircraft maintenance at the Federal Aviation Administration, at its engineering services and airframe maintenance sites in Greensboro, North Carolina, on August 11.
The visit opened at AAR's engineering services facility, a site the company picked up through its acquisition of Aircraft Reconfig Technologies earlier this year. That deal widened the company's engineering bench and added an Organization Designation Authorization, a status that allows a qualified company to carry out certain certification tasks on behalf of the FAA. The engineering team walked FAA staff through its current capabilities and explained how the acquisition changed its certification and technical support work.
Black then moved to the Greensboro airframe maintenance operation, where he led a site-wide safety stand-down. Employees used the session to review safety priorities and trade practices across shifts. A roundtable followed with AAR inspectors, auditors, and operational leaders covering regulatory oversight, certification steps, and how compliance activity is coordinated across the company's FAA-certificated sites.
Much of that conversation centered on AAR's Certificate Management Unit, the internal structure that oversees several FAA-certificated locations at once. Company representatives described how the unit keeps compliance, safety, and quality standards consistent across a maintenance network spread over multiple states and countries.
Art Smith, vice president and chief quality officer at AAR, said the visit gave employees direct contact with FAA leadership on shared safety responsibilities.
Visits of this kind reflect the working relationship between US regulators and repair stations as certification requirements grow more complex across distributed maintenance networks.
Source: MRO Business Today - https://mrobusinesstoday.com/aar-hosts-faa-maintenance-leadership-at-greensboro-engineering-and-mro-facilities/