Airborne Support Ltd are an established supplier to the aerospace industry, providing class leading aircraft spares support services to commercial and corporate operators of regional aircraft worldwide. ASL has held certification to ISO 9001:2008 since 2003 and needed to transition to the 2015 requirements before August 2018. As expected, traceability of aircraft parts is critical, especially as some parts are known as ‘rotable’. This means that they are ‘rotated’ out of one aeroplane, serviced and put back on another – this can be repeated until the part has reached the end of its useful life, is declared unserviceable and destroyed.

ASL operated an extremely well documented and tightly controlled processes to purchase aircraft parts, service them and sell them on so the emphasis of the transition project was to comply with the new ‘management’ requirements of the quality management system standard such as the context and risk clauses. Following discussions with the MD, we recorded information about external and internal issues and the interested parties (the context of the business) in the new quality manual. Due to the size of the company, the MD made the decision not to hold a formal risk register so we recorded the risk management process in the manual instead. The outcome of the project was a successful transition audit with no findings.