The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has published the third Means of Compliance with the Special Condition for VTOL, Doc. No. MOC-3 SC-VTOL, Issue 2.
The first issue of this document was subject to a public consultation on the EASA Comment-Response Tool (CRT) between 29 June 2022 and 12 August 2022.
The compliance document deals with batteries thermal runaway. It was consulted upon previously and the Comment response document is also available to help understanding the changes brought after consultation.
Rechargeable lithium batteries in aviation still represent a significant fire hazard when used as power supply for systems in traditional aircraft due to their susceptibility to failures leading to self-sustaining increases in temperature and pressure (thermal runaway).
It is essential to define test requirements that ensure the adequate level of safety of the product for the intended operational conditions in a feasible way. This may include considerations on the time-to-land following the detection of a thermal runaway.
The recent use of lithium batteries as propulsion energy storage devices in electric and hybrid aircraft increases the importance of properly addressing this hazard, due to their novel function, higher capacity, higher specific energy, higher voltage, and the lack of significant service experience in this context.
It is intended at a later stage to publish all MOC in a single document.
Download the documents here
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