The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears of FAA Part 135 Conformity.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks. One day, she went for a walk in the forest and came upon the three bears’ house. She knocked, and when no one answered, she let herself in.

Realizing she was hungry as a bear, she went into the kitchen, where she found three bowls of porridge on the table. But, when she tasted the porridge from the first bowl, she exclaimed, “This porridge is too hot!”

Next, she tasted the second bowl. “This porridge is too cold,” she said. Lastly, she tasted the third bowl of porridge. “Ah, this porridge is just right,” she said and ate it all up.

After walking so far and eating so much, she started feeling sleepy, so she went upstairs to the three bears’ bedroom. She lay down in the first bed, but it was too hard. Then she lay in the second bed, but it was too soft. Then she lay down in the third bed, which was just right.

After falling asleep, Goldilocks dreamed she was a DOM for Three Bears, Inc, and had been charged with doing all the due diligence needed to conform her company’s private aircraft to FAA Part 135 charter requirements.

This conformity is too hard.

She first tried creating the conformity package by photocopying the aircraft’s maintenance and operational records. She placed the copies along with all the required references, notations, 337 forms, etc., painstakingly putting them all in a three-ring binder. It was a nightmare, and it took weeks.

This conformity is too limiting.

Next, she hired an outside company to come in and scan all the pages. Again, a very long and arduous process. But instead of just printing the pages, this company turned each page into a digital .pdf file and proceeded to spend several days or weeks playing Acrobat gymnastics changing file names, manually pulling out pages, grouping them by task or FAA form. Those .pdf files were then bookmarked within a “digital binder” with all the required notations and dividers. Try collaborating and getting help from others in your department doing this within a desktop app. Basically it all falls on one person.

This was a bit better, but if a record or form didn’t make into the pdf binder, she was stuck going back to box diving in the paper records. Also, if the FAA inspector needed to cross-check any work that had been performed or verify an STC’s installation documents, she had to search through all these .pdf files manually rather than relate or link documents together for easy searches. The FAA inspector became as grumpy as a Grizzly.


MACH Conformity is just right.

Lastly, Goldilocks dreamed that she had signed up to use Bluetail’s new MACH Conformity module. One of its trained records experts came to her hangar and scanned all of the aircraft’s records required for a conformity inspection into Bluetail’s state-of-the-art, cloud-based aircraft records digitization portfolio.

Based on Bluetail’s industry-leading secure and scalable software platform and MACH Search capability, Goldilocks was happy to learn that the MACH Conformity module delivers a host of timesaving and revenue recapture features, including.

  • Easy-to-use conformity binder builder needed for the applicable FAA Flight Standards District Office (FSDO).
  • Digital paper clip-related lead documents, including STC’s with supporting Form 337s and 8130-3 forms, into single units of work.
  • Use MACH Search to quickly find Airworthiness Directives (ADs), as well as Chapters 4 and 5 requirements, and link supporting documents to the appropriate AD and OEM requirements.
  • Track the status of each binder chapter through a color-coding task manager including tracking assignments for each of her team members.
  • Easily save the final conformity binder for future use and export the documents into a standard format for the FSDO’s review.

And the best part was, now that all the aircraft’s records were professionally scanned and securely saved on Bluetail’s cloud server, all the valuable information was searchable, shareable, and forever safe from loss or damage.

When the three bears returned, while they didn’t like Goldilocks ransacking their house, they did like how easy Bluetail’s MACH Conformity would make it to make some extra money by chartering their family jet. So they decided not to eat her.

The moral of the story is, don’t wait until the bear is at the door. Contact Bluetail today and find out just how easy an FAA Part 135 conformity inspection project can be. Visit: https://bluetail.aero/why-bluetail/mach-conformity/.

JSSI Traxxall now integrates with Bluetail

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