Aerospace Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Certification is a documentation exercise attached to an engineering one. The aircraft, the system or the modification may be sound; what an authority approves is the demonstration that every applicable requirement has been met, requirement by requirement, with evidence identified and traceable. Programmes slip by months not because the engineering is late but because the paperwork proving it cannot be followed by somebody who was not there.

We edit what aerospace engineers and certification teams produce — certification plans and compliance matrices, means of compliance documentation, test plans, procedures and test reports, analysis and substantiation reports, system safety assessments and hazard analyses, design change and modification documentation, airworthiness and continued airworthiness documentation, supplemental type certificate submissions, qualification test documentation for equipment, technical publications and maintenance documentation, supplier requirement specifications and flow-down documents, and internal design review and gate documentation. Our editors work on the document an authority reads before anything is approved.

The compliance matrix is the spine of a certification programme, and its quality determines how many rounds of questions the submission attracts. A matrix listing requirements against a column marked "compliant" transfers nothing; the reader has to reconstruct what was done and find the evidence themselves. We work through these so every line states the means of compliance explicitly — analysis, test, inspection, similarity, or a combination, with the specific document and section that contains the evidence and its issue number; so partial compliance is declared as partial with the remaining gap and its closure plan, since a matrix that shows only green invites disbelief and a single discovered exception damages the credibility of every other line; so where compliance rests on similarity, the differences from the compared configuration are stated rather than the similarities; so the assumptions and limitations behind each analysis appear at the line rather than only inside the report; and so language distinguishes between what has been demonstrated and what is planned, given that a future tense in a compliance statement is the commonest cause of a finding. Matrices written this way shorten the review because the reviewer can follow them.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including designs, test data and certification material. We are editors rather than certification, airworthiness or safety specialists, and we offer no view on compliance, methodology or airworthiness. What we can do is make a submission followable by the person assessing it.