All commercial aircraft are designed, built, tested and certified in accordance with the international safety standards of ICAO Annex 8 – airworthiness.
Aircraft manufacturing countries have used the ICAO standards to develop their own airworthiness codes for aircraft manufacturing.
In the US, the airworthiness code is Federal Aviation Regulations Part 25 (FAR 25), while in the EU, the airworthiness code is Joint Airworthiness Regulations 25 (JAR 25), which is almost identical to FAR 25.
Most aircraft manufacturers in other parts of the world adopt the standards of FAR 25 and JAR 25.
In this way, the certification of foreign-built aircraft in the US and the EU is made easy.
Before the completed aircraft certificate of airworthiness can be issued, it must be verified that all parts and materials used in the manufacturing of the aircraft comply with the applicable airworthiness and manufacturing regulations.
In addition, all the passenger-cabin materials such as seats, side-wall panelling, carpets and bulkhead tapestries must be tested for compliance with the applicable flammability regulations.
On June 2, 1983, an Air Canada McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 aircraft operating a flight from the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport to Montréal-Dorval Airport developed an in-flight fire in a rear lavatory that spread between the outer skin and the inner decor panels, filling the cabin with toxic smoke. The fire burned through critical electrical cables, which disabled some of the instrumentation in the cockpit.
The aircraft made an emergency landing at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport. After it landed and the doors were opened, the heat of the fire and fresh oxygen from the opened exit doors created flashover conditions, and the aircraft's interior immediately became engulfed in flames, killing 23 of the 41 passengers.
This accident triggered a series of regulatory actions to increase the survivability of aircraft passengers and crew during an aircraft fire.
Consequently, US amended FAR Part 25 to prescribe more stringent flammability requirements for aircraft interior materials that lowered the heat release in the event of a fire.
BWIA was operating a fleet of McDonnell Douglas DC9-83 (MD 83) aircraft, which at that time was the most popular medium-range twin jet.
Douglas opened a second production line at its Long Beach, California facility to cope with the large backlog of MD83 orders.
In 1988, BWIA entered into a lease agreement with the International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC) for an MD83 aircraft Manufacturer’s S/N 49824.
In the same year, I attended a meeting at the Douglas facility along with the vice president, technical, of BWIA, to discuss the new flammability requirements for tapestries that were to be installed on all the interior cabin bulkheads.
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We met with Douglas’s industrial design personnel, who advised that during testing
