Quality Management and Regulate Your Aviation Needs with AS Standard

The aviation and aerospace industry is one of the most highly regulated industries, with a demand for quality products that are matched by very few industries. Every part must be tested and approved as air-worthy as well as meet certain requirements before being put into an airplane. There are many different types of standards that regulate commercial aviation as well as military equipment. Many are industry-wide standards and followed by hundreds of companies, whereas some are company-specific standards.

For many years, OEMs and major manufacturers would take customer and regulatory requirements and add their company specific requirements to them. These were essential quality system requirements in which audits were performed against. The problem with this, however, is that with so many different company-specific standards, suppliers were constantly audited using different criteria for the same basic top level standard. Furthermore, eliminating dual and redundant quality systems and adopting a single process for quality assurance would lead to huge cost savings. Many recognized the problem of contradictory requirements that arose with many parties having their own non-streamlined standards. Because of this, quality assurance systems such as the AS standards and ISO were created. This allowed for one streamlined quality assurance system that assured products were safe and reliable and perform in accordance with the manufacturer.

AS9100 is a quality management standard used today specifically in the aviation and aerospace industry. AS 9000 was first published in 1997 with assistance from large contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, GE Aircraft Engines and written against the clauses of ISO 9001:1994. In 1999, the first revision of AS 9100 was published by The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International) with input from the American Aerospace Quality Group (AAQG) and support from the International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG) and the Society of British Aerospace Companies (SBAC).

AS 9100 references sections that include the following: reliability / maintainability / safety, document of design verification and validation, design verification and validation testing, production documentation, control of production process changes, control of production equipment, tools and numerical control programs, and first article inspection. AS 9000 was the basic quality system standard originally written in 1997, which was improved upon with AS 9100, a model for quality assurance in design, development, production, installation, and servicing. It is one of the most widely used standards and quality systems in place today.

Most major companies are either AS or ISO certified. Companies that carry AS standard parts include Thermalloy, Philips components, Raytheon, Alder, Cessna, and International Rectifier, among others. AS Standards mainly govern the quality assurance processes of companies as opposed to the design and production of the parts themselves.

Where to Get Best Distributors :

ASAP Semiconductor is a whole distributor of all types of AS standards parts. We carry parts from almost all major manufacturers and have access to over 10 million parts. We also have access to parts from most major AS and ISO certified companies. Call us today for a quote to meet your parts needs.