CAME (Continuing Airworthiness Management Exposition)

The CAME is to a CAMO what a maintenance organisation exposition is to a Part-145 shop: the approved statement of how the organisation works, against which it is audited and by which its staff are bound.

The distinction to hold onto is between the **CAMO** and the **CAME**. The CAMO is the organisation — approved under EASA Part-CAMO, or previously under Part-M Subpart G — responsible for continuing airworthiness management: maintenance programmes, defect and Airworthiness Directive management, airworthiness reviews where the privilege is held, and control of the records. The CAME is its exposition, the document describing how it discharges those responsibilities.

A CAME follows a conventional structure. A **management section** names the accountable manager and the nominated postholders, describes the organisational chart and states the scope of approval and the aircraft types covered. A **procedures section** is the substance: how the aircraft maintenance programme is developed and revised, how Airworthiness Directives and Service Bulletins are assessed and embodied, how defects and deferrals are controlled, how maintenance is contracted to and controlled at approved organisations, how records are maintained, how mass and balance and the technical log system are managed, and how the airworthiness review is conducted where that privilege exists. A **contracted-work section** covers arrangements with owners and with maintenance organisations. An **appendix section** carries the forms, the sample documents and the list of contracted parties.

The operative fact is that the CAME is **binding on the organisation and controlled by the authority**. Procedures cannot be varied informally: if the organisation changes how it does something the CAME describes, the CAME is amended, and significant amendments require authority approval before they take effect. An audit finding is frequently not that a practice was unsafe but that it differed from what the exposition said — the exposition is the standard.

For flight training, the relevance depends on structure. An ATO operating EASA-registered aircraft needs continuing airworthiness management, whether by holding its own CAMO approval — and therefore maintaining a CAME — or by contracting to an external CAMO, in which case that organisation's CAME governs the arrangement and the school's obligations sit in the contract.

There is no FAA equivalent. The continuing airworthiness responsibilities are distributed differently in the US system, resting principally on the owner or operator under 14 CFR Part 91 and on the certificate holder's programme under Parts 121 and 135.

For a school, the first question is whether it holds a CAMO approval or contracts one. Holding one means owning a CAME, keeping it current, and staffing the postholder roles it names — real ongoing cost that only makes sense at a certain fleet size.

Contracting to a CAMO does not remove the obligation, it relocates it. The contract defines who does what, and the areas that generate findings are the boundaries: who assesses an Airworthiness Directive, who authorises a deferral, who holds the records, and who notices when an airworthiness review is approaching.

The recurring failure with an exposition of any kind is drift. Practice evolves, the document does not, and the gap is invisible until an audit compares the two. A CAME that has not been revised in several years is either describing an organisation that has not changed at all, or describing one that no longer exists.

Aviatize supports the record-keeping side of continuing airworthiness rather than the approval itself. Maintenance status is tracked per aircraft — instructions, Airworthiness Directives, Service Bulletins and open squawks — with aircraft availability limited when status requires it, and work planned as work orders and work packs with time, parts and tools recorded against each task as it is carried out.

Document management is compatible with both FAA and EASA requirements and supports separate document libraries, and the compliance module tracks internal audits and the follow-up of audit findings — which is the machinery a CAMO needs behind the procedures its exposition describes. Holding the approval, writing and revising the CAME, and staffing its postholder roles remain the organisation's own responsibility.