Eighty Certificates, Eight Simulators

What regulatory duplication actually costs one Singapore training centre — and the two occasions it has been avoided

Jonathan Lim, Quality and Compliance Monitoring Manager, Airbus Asia Training Centre, APATS 2026, FSTD Operators Stream

The preceding sessions had made the case for harmonization in terms of rulemaking, panels and timelines. Jonathan Lim made it in terms of binders.

“I remember there’s one sim in our training centre. We have two different MQTG binders, which we need to maintain rigorously. It’s not a joke.”

Lim is quality and compliance monitoring manager at the Airbus Asia Training Centre in Singapore, and the numbers he brought to the APATS FSTD Operators stream are the clearest statement of the problem anyone offered.

Around 80 FSTD certificates. Eight simulators. Sixteen different authorities.

“One simulator, averagely, we have 10 certificates.”

On top of that sit more than 70 audits a year — a figure that excludes the internal audits Lim runs himself.

“You can imagine the amount of work that we are actually having to do. And it’s a lot of work.”

The centre

Airbus Asia Training Centre has operated since 2015, near Seletar Airport, as a joint venture between Airbus and Singapore Airlines, and forms part of the Airbus global flight training network. Lim noted its proximity to Boeing’s Singapore facility with some amusement. “Singapore is very small.”

The centre has ten bays, nine of them fully occupied, covering the A320, A330, A350 and A380, and also hosts an ATR. It holds EASA and CAAS approvals alongside other ATO approvals.

Its customer base is the reason the certificate count is what it is. The centre is centred on Asia and most of its regulatory work follows from that, but it also trains customers from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific nations — and the authorities arrive with the customers.

On the technical side, the centre complies with EASA CS-FSTD(A) Issue 2 and, simultaneously, ICAO Doc 9625 Edition 4. Hence the two binders for one simulator.

“This is very challenging. And currently there’s no regulatory harmonization or mutual recognition between the different APAC authorities and EASA, as we know today.”

What harmonization would actually change

Lim structured the rest of his session around three questions beginning “what if“, and answered each from experience rather than principle.

The first: what if there were regulatory harmonization between the APAC authorities and EASA?

His example was deliberately mundane. A European customer wanting to train at the centre on one of its simulators. Under harmonization, “all that we need to do is to provide the EASA certificates, and that’s all that we need to do.”

He was precise about what he was and was not asking for, and the distinction deserves repeating because it anticipates the obvious objection.

“What we mentioned here is not the way of the shortcut. It is to reduce the duplication.”

And then the argument that carried the room, which is a safety argument rather than an efficiency one.

“Duplication doesn’t mean that it’s effective. Effective is to provide more time, to provide more oversight on the regulations, to ensure safety.”

Mutual recognition, once

The second question — what if there were mutual recognition — Lim could answer from a case three or four years ago.

An Australian customer approached the centre wanting to use one of its simulators. The centre submitted its CAAS certificate. The Australian authority accepted it.

“Right now we mutually recognize your simulator” — and the customer could use it with no extra paperwork and no duplication.

Lim was careful not to frame the benefit as commercial.

“We are not focusing just to save cost, not just focusing on cutting the paperwork. It’s actually to increase our efficiency. And also, from the regulator’s point, they can optimize the workload, the manpower of the regulators as well. So that they can do more work on the safety oversight.”

That is the same conclusion Andy Gillbard had reached from the ICAO panel’s side earlier in the session, arriving from the opposite direction: regulators have finite specialist resource, and the current model spends it in the wrong place.

The authorities are not in the room

Lim’s third question was whether this FSTDO regulatory forum should run annually. He thought it should, and considers it the way to start regional harmonization and mutual recognition.

But he attached a condition to his own proposal, and it was the most useful thing said all morning.

“I felt one thing that’s critical here is to engage the NAA as well. So yesterday I have spoken to CAA Singapore as well. They do not know that we have this FSTDO stream.”

An operator holding certificates from sixteen authorities had to tell his own national regulator, in the same city, that the conference stream existed.

The point lands harder given where the rest of the session had gone. Mark Dransfield had spent his opening arguing that Asia-Pacific holds up to a third of the world’s flight simulation capacity with no forum to coordinate it, and had listed the European and American bodies that have filled that role for decades. Gillbard had set out an ICAO programme that will eventually require national authorities to implement a fundamentally different oversight model. Neither works if the local authorities are not present to understand, discuss and adapt.

“We need to engage them even more, to let them participate in this forum together, and to make it successful.”

Lim closed on the note the whole stream had been building toward, from the only speaker who had quantified what the current arrangement costs.

“I’m sure that from this FSTDO regulatory conference, we will kick-start something that is very, very important, to make our industry go together.”

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