Program Charter

Program charter authorizing Acme Aerostructures to execute the CWP-700 Composite Wing Panel Production Program for Meridian Aircraft Co., establishing scope, sponsorship, phasing, quality framework and success criteria for the production of composite trailing-edge wing panels for the Meridian M7 narrowbody.

1. Program Overview

This charter records the program as authorized, including two corrections carried backward into it: the budget and team-size baselines were corrected from original estimates, and the budget subsequently grew through decision D-06. Because a correction of an estimating error is not a variance, it is reflected here rather than tracked against this document. Current status, spend and staffing live in the Program Dashboard, Program Budget and Resource Plan.

2. Background & Business Case

Meridian Aircraft Co. sources trailing-edge composite wing panels for its M7 narrowbody program from a small pool of qualified Tier 1 suppliers. Acme Aerostructures was awarded this production contract following a competitive source-selection process that evaluated AS9100 certification standing, First Article Inspection track record, and production capacity.

This program represents Acme's first dedicated production contract for the M7 platform specifically, following prior qualification work on Meridian's legacy aircraft programs — a track record Meridian's sourcing team weighted heavily, since a Tier 1 composite supplier's quality history is a leading indicator of production reliability.

The commercial logic is straightforward and worth stating plainly: on a fixed-price production contract, Acme earns on throughput and consistency, not on effort. Every scrapped panel, every rework cycle and every nonconformance that stops a shipment is absorbed internally. Quality is therefore not a cost center on this program — it is the margin mechanism. That single fact shapes the quality framework in §5 and the reserve policy in §11.

3. Contract Structure & Funding

This is a fixed-price production contract, not a cost-reimbursement arrangement — Acme Aerostructures is paid the contracted unit price per accepted panel, and bears the internal cost risk of production inefficiency, scrap, or rework rather than passing it back to Meridian.

The $9,284,000 total program budget shown above is Acme's internal delivery-team cost baseline (see the Resource Plan and Program Budget), not the unit-price contract value Meridian pays per panel. The two are related but distinct, and conflating them is the most common misreading of a production program's financials: one is what it costs Acme to stand up and run the line, the other is what Meridian pays for each accepted article.

The word accepted carries the weight. Payment attaches to acceptance, not to production — a panel that is manufactured but rejected has consumed cost and earned nothing. This is why the program's traceability terminates in acceptance rather than completion, as set out in the Requirements Traceability Matrix.

4. Program Phasing

The 18-month period of performance is deliberately split into two phases with different objectives, different risk profiles and a hard gate between them:

The distinction between the two phases is not administrative. Phase 1 answers a question about capability; Phase 2 answers a question about consistency, and they fail in different ways. A program that treats First Article acceptance as the finish line rather than the entry gate will under-resource the ramp that follows it — which is precisely where a composite production program is most exposed.

5. Quality System & Standards Framework

The program operates inside a certified quality system, and the standards below are contractual conditions of doing business with Meridian rather than internal preferences:

• AS9100 — the aerospace quality management system standard Acme holds certification against, and must maintain continuously for the program's duration. See the AS9100 QMS.
• AS9102 — First Article Inspection, executed via Forms 1/2/3 with full ballooned-drawing dimensional inspection and material/process certification review. See First Article Inspection.
• AS9145 / PPAP — advanced product quality planning and the production part approval discipline applied both internally, through the Control Plan, and outward to the supply base.
• NADCAP and NAS 410 — accreditation for special processes and certification of NDT personnel, covering the operations whose output cannot be fully verified by inspection after the fact.

The governing technical reality behind all of it: composite properties are created in the autoclave and cannot be reworked. Quality has to be built in during processing and can only be confirmed afterwards, which is why the program's controls sit upstream in process qualification rather than downstream in inspection.

6. Product Requirements & Control

Requirements on this program are not written by Acme — they are Meridian's engineering data. The Control Plan (AS9145) enumerates the controlled characteristics that data implies: 6 Key Characteristics, 5 critical process parameters and 3 standard characteristics, each with the method that verifies it and the inspection intensity it carries. The Requirements Traceability Matrix then traces every one of those characteristics through verification and FAI evidence to its acceptance path.

Classification determines how intensively a characteristic is verified, never whether it is. Key Characteristics are verified 100% for the life of the program and are never sampled; standard characteristics may earn sampling once statistical capability is demonstrated, and revert automatically if capability is lost.

7. Supply Chain

A significant share of the program's quality risk sits with external suppliers — composite prepreg, hardware, and accredited special processes. The Supplier Management Plan implements AS9100 §8.4 for the program, classifying the supply base by how far conformity can be verified after delivery and qualifying suppliers through PPAP and, where applicable, NADCAP accreditation.

Supplier certifications are a schedule dependency, not merely a quality one: raw-material certifications and PPAP submissions must be complete before First Article Inspection can be scheduled, so supplier performance moves the FAI date directly.

That dependency has already bitten once. A raw-material lot's PPAP submission arrived incomplete — missing a single dimensional report — and the lot could not be qualified on schedule. The material itself may well have been conforming; what failed was the record. On a program where acceptance rests on evidence, an incomplete record is a nonconformance even when the physical material conforms, and a PPAP package that is 95% present is not 95% qualified. The Supplier Management Plan consequently tracks submission completeness as a metric in its own right rather than assuming that a submission received is a submission adequate.

The single-source prepreg position compounds this. Where a material has one qualified source, the program has no commercial lever and no alternate to switch to within the qualification timeline — so supplier management here is early-warning and relationship management rather than substitution, which is why it is carried as the highest-rated risk in §19.

8. Program Objectives & Success Criteria

• First Article Inspection (per AS9102) accepted by Meridian source inspection within the Phase 1 schedule (Milestone Gate, Sep 25, 2026).
• Phase 2 production ramps to full contracted rate with on-time delivery performance and zero missed delivery commitments to Meridian.
• Zero repeat nonconformances of the same root cause across the production run — every Material Review Board disposition closes with a documented, verified-effective corrective action.
• Program closes within the $9,284,000 total budget baseline, reconciled to $0 variance at Closeout.
• Zero nonconformances reach Meridian undetected — every escape caught internally.

The third and fifth criteria are the ones that distinguish a production program from a project. Delivering on time once is a schedule outcome; never repeating a root cause, and never letting an escape reach the customer, are system outcomes — and on a Tier 1 aerospace contract they are what the next contract is awarded on.

9. Scope

In scope: design-to-print manufacture of composite trailing-edge wing panels per Meridian-supplied engineering data; tooling design, fabrication and qualification for the CWP-700 panel family; First Article Inspection per AS9102 including full ballooned-drawing dimensional inspection and material/process certification review; steady-state production at the contracted rate through the full 12-month Phase 2 period; ongoing Material Review Board support for production nonconformances including root cause and corrective action; supplier quality management for raw material and hardware sources including PPAP and source inspection; and part marking and lot-level traceability.

Design authority remains with Meridian. This is a build-to-print program: Acme manufactures to supplied engineering data and holds no authority to alter form, fit or function. Any deviation requires disposition through the Material Review Board and, for major or structural findings, Meridian's own concurrence.

10. High-Level Requirements

• All delivered panels must conform to Meridian's engineering data and drawing tolerances with zero unauthorized deviation; any deviation requires MRB disposition and, for major/structural findings, Meridian's concurrence.
• The production system must operate under Acme's AS9100-certified QMS for the full program duration, including maintained calibration, traceability and configuration-control records.
• First Article Inspection must be performed and documented per AS9102 (Forms 1/2/3) prior to Phase 2 production release.
• All raw material and purchased-part suppliers must complete PPAP qualification before their material is used in deliverable hardware.

11. Summary Milestone Schedule

12. Summary Budget

This is Acme's internal delivery-team cost baseline, not the unit-price contract value Meridian pays per panel (see §3). The labor line reconciles to the Resource Plan across the 50-person program team spanning both phases.

13. Management Reserve & Financial Controls

A Program Management Reserve of $383,000 — approximately 4.3% of the cost subtotal — is authorized and held by the Program Manager against identified risks. It is deliberately modest by comparison with a development program's contingency, because a build-to-print production contract carries less requirements uncertainty: the design is fixed, and the risk that remains is operational rather than definitional.

Variance exceeding the reserve is not a Program Manager decision at any threshold — it escalates to the Executive Sponsor. Scrap and rework are absorbed against the reserve and the margin, never invoiced to Meridian, which is the direct financial consequence of the fixed-price structure in §3.

The reserve is also phase-weighted in practice rather than drawn evenly. Phase 1 concentrates the qualification unknowns — tooling that has never made this part, a process that has never been run to this drawing — so the reserve is most exposed before First Article acceptance and least exposed once capability is demonstrated and the line is running to rate.

14. Organization & Resourcing

The program is authorized a 50-person delivery team across both phases, corrected from an original 14-person estimate and subsequently expanded through decision D-06, which corrected NDT capacity that had been sized for the wrong production phase. Roster detail sits in the Resource Plan, reporting lines in the Org Chart, and accountabilities in the RACI Matrix.

Phase 1 and Phase 2 draw on materially different skill mixes — tooling and qualification engineering early, production, inspection and NDT capacity later — which is what made the original single-phase sizing wrong rather than merely low.

15. Nonconformance & MRB Authority

Because the program builds to someone else's design, the authority to accept a nonconforming part is deliberately constrained. Every nonconformance is dispositioned through the Material Review Board as use-as-is, rework, scrap, or return-to-supplier.

Acme cannot unilaterally disposition a major or structural nonconformance. Use-as-is and repair carry the heaviest justification burden, because the part ships with the condition in it — and where the affected characteristic is a Key Characteristic derived from Meridian's engineering, disposition requires Meridian's concurrence rather than Acme's manufacturing judgment. That constraint is a safety control, not a commercial one: it prevents manufacturer convenience from substituting for the customer's engineering authority.

16. Governance & Decision Rights

Decision authority is tiered, with a distinct joint path for anything touching Meridian's engineering:

See Program Governance for the full RACI, review cadence and escalation path, and the AS9100 QMS page for how this program's quality artifacts trace to the certification Acme holds as a condition of doing business with Meridian.

17. Program Manager Authority

C. Tyrrell is hereby authorized to apply organizational resources to program activities, manage the approved budget within the cost baseline (escalating to the Executive Sponsor for any variance exceeding the approved Program Management Reserve), and approve task-level schedule adjustments that do not affect a milestone-gate date.

Changes to scope, the cost baseline, or a decision affecting form/fit/function require Executive Sponsor approval — and, for anything touching Meridian's engineering data or a major/structural MRB disposition, joint approval with the Meridian Program Office.

18. Key Stakeholders

19. High-Level Risks

• Single-source composite prepreg material carries schedule risk if lead time extends or the supplier has a quality escape (highest-rated risk at Charter approval).
• NDT capacity was originally sized for the wrong production phase and required correction before Phase 2 ramp — see RAIDD D-06.
• A tight tooling-qualification schedule in Phase 1 leaves limited float before the FAI milestone gate.
• Customer source-inspection scheduling at Meridian is outside Acme's direct control and can affect the FAI acceptance date.

The first and last share a characteristic worth naming: both are risks Acme carries but does not control. A single-source material supplier and a customer's inspection calendar are external dependencies, and on a fixed-price contract the cost of either slipping lands on Acme regardless. Full register in the RAIDD Log.

20. Assumptions & Constraints

• Meridian-supplied engineering data is complete and stable at Charter approval; any subsequent engineering change flows through Meridian's own change process, not this program's internal scope.
• Named resources are available at their planned allocation across both phases; no extended unplanned absences are assumed.
• Existing facility, tooling storage and autoclave capacity are sufficient to support the contracted production rate without separate capital investment beyond what is budgeted.
• This is a commercial (non-ITAR) program; no export-control licensing is required for any program activity as scoped.
• The program must maintain continuous AS9100 certification; a lapse would suspend Acme's ability to deliver.

21. Document Control & Related Documents

This charter authorizes the program as described and is superseded only by a re-issued charter approved by the Executive Sponsor. Baseline changes are made through the program's change control process and recorded in the Change Control Log.

• Control Plan (AS9145) and Requirements Traceability Matrix
• Inspection, Test & Verification Strategy and First Article Inspection
• AS9100 Quality Management System, Supplier Management Plan, Material Review Board
• Program Management Plan, Resource Plan, Program Budget
• RAIDD Log, Program Governance, RACI Matrix, Communications Plan

22. Approval

This charter authorizes the Program Manager to proceed with execution of the CWP-700 Composite Wing Panel Production Program as described above, within the authority defined in §17.