The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is concerned that other countries are not applying “sufficient resources” to certifying US aerospace products, and the government is looking to level the playing field, according to the authority’s administrator Bryan Bedford.
The remarks, made on the sidelines of the Changi Aviation Summit in Singapore, come days after US president Donald Trump threatened to decertify all new aircraft made in Canada until Ottawa approves new business jets made by US manufacturer Gulfstream Aerospace.
“Our concern is whether or not sufficient resources are being applied to US products equal to the resources that we’re applying to certify foreign products,” Bedford said, as reported by Bloomberg and Reuters. “We just want a level playing field.”
He did not confirm whether the authority would strip the safety permits for Canadian-made aircraft. Type certification in the US is controlled by the FAA, with the president having no legal way of directly causing a type to be decertified. Suspension of aircraft type certificates are extremely rare events that mostly happen only after serious crashes.
However, Bedford said that when the FAA certifies an aircraft, it expects other authorities to accept the certification. “They normally do a validation programme and those things shouldn’t take five, six, and seven years.”
US-made G700 and G800 were certified by the FAA in 2025. Canada has not certified them because of pending fuel-icing tests, according to industry minister Mélanie Joly, who added that the certification process was “well underway.” Both the FAA and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) granted Gulfstream an exemption until the end of 2026 to do more testing and address potential issues related to ice in the business jet's fuel system. Canada did not grant that exemption.
The Canadian Department of Transport told Bloomberg that it was working "to resolve outstanding certification matters in a way that protects safety and regulatory integrity, while maintaining market access on both sides of the border."
A fake emergency airworthiness directive, supposedly issued by the FAA and instructing that the type certificate for all aircraft whose final assembly was completed in Canada be revoked with immediate effect, is circulating online. However, no such directive has been published by the FAA at the time of the publication, according to the US Federal Register.
