DEFINITION:

Certification means the legal recognition by the certification authority that a product, service, organisation or person complies with the applicable requirements. Such certification comprises the activity of technically checking the product, service, organisation or person and the formal recognition of compliance with the applicable requirements by issue of a certificate, license, approval or other documents as required by national laws and procedures.

In particular, certification of a product involves:

(a) The process of assessing the design of a product to ensure that it complies with a set of standards applicable to that type of product so as to demonstrate an acceptable level of safety.

(b) The process of assessing an individual product to ensure that it conforms with the certified type design.

(c) The issue of any certificate required by national laws to declare that compliance or conformity has been found with standards in accordance with items (a) or (b) above.

(Ref. ARP4754)

(Source: ACARE Domain 606)

SUBDOMAINS:

1. Certification of new technologies and operations
2. Certification of air-worthiness, certification requirements for airborne and non-airborne systems.
3. Incremental certification
4. System safety assessment
5. HW / SW certification
6. Improvement of existing rules and regulations (e.g. Cross-wind criteria, contaminated runway criteria), in the future particularly relevant to ATM in view of complete lack of certification of ATM systems)