Your CAMO audit (national authority / EASA): the checklist to walk in prepared

What the auditor looks at first

Whether they come from the national authority, from another European authority or from an operator customer, the auditor of a continuing airworthiness management organisation (Part-CAMO) does not start with your screens: they start with an aircraft. They pick one — often the one that has flown the most or whose inspection is due — and follow the chain of evidence:

• the applicable maintenance programme, its current revision and its approval;
• the status of due items: hours, cycles, calendar limits, life-limited and hard-time components, with the dates of last accomplishment;
• airworthiness directive (AD) and service bulletin tracking, including repetitive ADs and those declared "not applicable" with their justification;
• consistency between the technical log and the hours and cycles recorded in the tracking system;
• the certificates: release to service (CRS) for the latest work, EASA Form 1 for installed parts, a valid airworthiness review certificate (ARC).

If these five elements match without contradiction, the audit goes smoothly. If someone has to fetch a binder, call the workshop or recalculate a life limit by hand, the inspector digs deeper — and that is where findings appear.

The five most frequent findings

Audit reports look alike from one CAMO to the next. Five findings come up almost every time:

1. A wrong component life figure, because the installation time was entered with the airframe hours of the day instead of those at the time of replacement.
2. An AD marked "complied with" without the work reference (work order, CRS, record page) that proves it.
3. A maintenance programme revised by the manufacturer but not yet loaded into the tracking: the new tasks are not scheduled.
4. A gap of a few hours between technical log and tracking, built up through late entries.
5. Records that are hard to produce: archived but scattered between paper, mailboxes and servers, with no index.

None of these findings reflects a lack of competence. They reflect a lack of tooling: tracking kept on spreadsheets, or in software that enforces neither links between objects, nor attachments, nor consistency checks.

Preparing the audit in 30 days: the checklist

D-30 — Check the reference data. Maintenance programme at its latest revision; AD list reviewed at the latest issue; manufacturer documentation up to date for every type in the fleet.

D-21 — Reconcile the hours. For each aircraft, compare the latest technical log with the tracking system; correct and document every discrepancy.

D-14 — Test the chain of evidence. Take three tasks at random (an AD, a life-limited component, an inspection) and check that you can find, in under five minutes: the task, the work order, the CRS, the Form 1 and the person who signed.

D-7 — Re-read the airworthiness reviews. Current ARC, previous review reports, corrective actions closed.

D-1 — Prepare the exports. Fleet status, items due within 90 days, AD list per aircraft, internal findings register. The auditor will appreciate receiving the documents before asking for them.

What digital airworthiness management changes

With airworthiness management software such as TracingNav, the chain of evidence is no longer rebuilt for the audit: it exists every day. Each task is linked to its work order, each component to its Form 1, each AD to its justification. Hours entered in the technical log feed the life limits directly, and an inconsistent entry is flagged before it is recorded. The exports the inspector asks for — fleet status, due items, ADs, component history — are produced in one click, dated and signed.

The result for our customers: shorter audits, fewer documentary findings and, above all, teams that treat the inspector's visit as a formality rather than an ordeal.

Want to see how your next audit can be prepared in 30 minutes? Book an online demonstration: we take one of your aircraft and produce the complete chain of evidence together.