Airworthiness Maintenance Inspection Notes, A-1231 Curtiss-Wright

Back before the FAA existed, aviation in the USA was under the authority of the Department of Commerce's Civil Aeronautic Administration (also called the CAA).

In those days, much information was published in the interest of safety. Unfortunately, these documents are not readily available today.   Similar to today's Airworthiness Directives (AD's) were publications known as Airworthiness Bulletins or Airworthiness Maintenance Bulletins and were considered mandatory safety items.  Other CAA documents similar to today's Special Airworthiness Information Bulletins (SAIB's) were Airworthiness Maintenance Inspection Notes (AMIN).  These documents include safety related inspection items that should be required at annual inspection.  These are generally considered to be mandatory as well, but this is not verified. The AMIN's are aircraft model specific. 

We recently obtained a copy of document no. A-1231, Airworthiness Maintenance Inspection Notes for Curtiss-Wright Aircraft, dated July 7, 1941.  Covered in this document are annual inspection requirements for Travel Air biplanes and monoplanes (including CW Travel Air), Curtiss Robin, CW Jr., CW Sedan, and CW Condor.  CAP has taken the time to reproduce the four pages because they were hardly legible.  While we claim no responsibility for the technical content of these documents, we wanted to make this information available here for historical information to restorers, operators, and enthusiasts of the grand old flying machines.

Thanks to our very good friend and Curtiss Robin restorer, Lane Tufts, for providing copies of the original document.


Maintenance Bulletin No. 4 dated  December 27, 1938 - Curtiss-Wright Travel Air shock absorbers.  This one is mentioned by SPECIAL NOTE 12 in the above AMIN.

 

I am pretty sure this one was provided by Darrell Starr.


Call for Papers
CAP is looking for more of these old CAA documents and we intend to use this blog as a collection center for such information.  If any of our readers run across these old CAA documents, please send them to us and we will make these hard-to-find documents available here.