Continuous Airworthiness Maintenance Program (CAMP)

The Continuous Airworthiness Maintenance Program is the legal foundation of maintenance for U.S. commercial air carriers and large turbine-powered charter operators. Part 121 operators (scheduled airlines) are required under 14 CFR §121.367 to hold an FAA-approved CAMP before commencing operations, and to operate each aircraft in compliance with that program. For Part 135 operators (on-demand and commuter air taxis), §135.411(a)(2) requires a CAMP for large aircraft (over 12,500 lb MTOW) and multiengine turbine-powered rotorcraft used in air carrier operations. For such operators, the standard §91.409 annual and 100-hour inspection requirements are explicitly inapplicable — the CAMP supersedes them entirely.

A CAMP is a document-intensive, customized maintenance plan that the operator develops in conjunction with the aircraft manufacturer's maintenance planning data and then submits for approval to the FAA through the operator's assigned Principal Maintenance Inspector (PMI), who sits at the operator's Certificate Management Office (CMO) or Flight Standards District Office (FSDO). The program must address: scheduled inspections (typically structured as A-check, B-check, C-check, and D-check intervals for transport-category aircraft, though FAA does not mandate those specific labels); time-controlled component replacement (hard-life items such as turbine disk life limits, landing gear overhaul intervals, and structural components with fatigue lives defined in the Aircraft Maintenance Manual or structural repair manual); on-condition maintenance for components not subject to hard lives; and compliance with all applicable airworthiness directives under 14 CFR Part 39.

For Part 121 operators, the CAMP must also include a Continuous Analysis and Surveillance System (CASS) under §121.373. The CASS is essentially a built-in quality assurance mechanism: it requires the operator to continuously monitor the effectiveness of its CAMP by analyzing maintenance data, flight crew reports, and reliability trends to detect adverse patterns before they result in safety events. If the CASS identifies a trend — for example, an elevated rate of component removals on a particular engine module — the operator must investigate and, if warranted, revise the CAMP (subject to PMI approval). Large operators typically run CASS through a dedicated Reliability department using aviation-specific software that tracks unscheduled removal rates, dispatch reliability, and component mean time between failures.

Revisions to an approved CAMP must go through the same approval cycle as the original: the operator proposes a change, the PMI reviews it against 14 CFR Part 121 Subpart L (for Part 121) or Part 135 Subpart J (for Part 135), and a formal approval letter or operations specification amendment is issued before the change can be implemented. This approval cycle can take weeks to months for significant structural changes, making CAMP configuration management a specialized discipline within aviation compliance departments.

The EASA equivalent of the CAMP is the Approved Maintenance Programme (AMP), governed by EASA Part-M Subpart G (for CAMO — Continuing Airworthiness Management Organization) and Part-CAMO. The AMP is similarly structured around the Maintenance Review Board (MRB) report (for transport-category aircraft) and must be approved by the competent authority. ICAO Annex 6 (Operation of Aircraft), Part I, Chapter 8, establishes the international framework from which both the FAA CAMP and EASA AMP derive.

For flight schools operating at the scale of a Part 141 integrated academy with a Part 135 charter certificate or a combined ATO/AOC operation, the CAMP boundary matters greatly: the moment an operator adds a large or multiengine turbine aircraft to a commercial operation, the CAMP obligation attaches. Schools that acquire turbine trainers — Beechcraft King Airs, Pilatus PC-12s, or TBM series aircraft operated under Part 135 — must maintain separate CAMP documentation for those aircraft, with all the PMI approval overhead that entails. The CAMP cannot simply be a modified version of the school's existing §91.409-based maintenance schedule; it must be independently structured and approved.

The CASS requirement under §121.373 effectively mandates that operators with significant fleets invest in maintenance data analytics. Schools and operators that rely on paper logbooks and manual tracking are structurally unable to run a compliant CASS, making digital maintenance record systems a compliance necessity rather than merely an efficiency tool for operators in this tier.

Aviatize's maintenance control module can be configured to reflect the inspection interval structure defined in an operator's approved CAMP — whether that is a traditional A/B/C/D-check framework or a custom interval structure agreed with the PMI. Each aircraft's CAMP-driven inspection schedule is maintained as a separate track from Part 91 operational aircraft in the same fleet, preventing the two maintenance regimes from being conflated.

For operators with CASS obligations, Aviatize's maintenance execution module captures unscheduled removal data, squawk rates, and component removal-reason codes at the work order level. This data feeds into KPI reporting dashboards that allow a reliability manager to monitor component removal trends across the fleet — the raw data pipeline that an effective CASS depends on. When revision proposals to the CAMP are in process with the PMI, the pending revision can be flagged in the system so maintenance managers know which tasks are operating under current approval versus proposed-but-not-yet-approved revision.