Ask a student what MEL stands for and most get it right: Minimum Equipment List.
Ask what it actually permits on the Cessna or Piper they flew yesterday, and the confidence usually drops fast.
The MEL most trainers do not have
A Minimum Equipment List is an approved document, specific to one aircraft, that lets an operator legally dispatch with certain items inoperative. Under FAR 91.213(a), the rule most training syllabi still reference, an aircraft may fly with inoperative equipment only if an approved MEL exists for that airframe and a Letter of Authorisation is carried on board.
Most light trainers never get one. The overwhelming majority of Cessna 152s, 172s and Piper PA-28s on a flying-school ramp, in Kenya or anywhere else, have no MEL document in the aircraft at all.
That is not a gap in the system. FAR 91.213(d) builds a separate, simpler path for exactly this case: small, non-turbine aircraft without an approved MEL.
Under that exception, an item may be flown inoperative if it is removed or deactivated, the cockpit control is placarded "Inoperative," the discrepancy is logged under Part 43, and a certificated pilot or a qualified mechanic determines the item is not a hazard for the specific flight being flown.
The FAA's current guidance on this, Advisory Circular 91-67A, spells out both methods side by side and explicitly covers Part 91 flights conducted under Part 141 and 142 training certificates. It was written with flying schools in mind, not just corporate flight departments with a fat MEL binder.
The gap most pilots never close is this: "it's on the MEL" is a sentence that requires an actual MEL to exist. For almost every aircraft a Kenyan student will fly, it does not.
What Kenyan regulation actually says
KCAA's Civil Aviation (Airworthiness) Regulations, 2018 (Legal Notice No. 90) set the framework a flying school's fleet operates under. Part IV places the duty for maintenance, continuing airworthiness information, and the reporting of failures and defects squarely on the operator, not on whichever pilot happened to notice the fault.
Part V of the same regulations governs who is actually permitted to perform and certify that maintenance.
Sitting alongside that, the Civil Aviation (Instruments and Equipment) Regulations, 2018 (Legal Notice No. 131) set out the baseline of instruments and equipment an aircraft must carry and have working. The Civil Aviation (Operation of Aircraft, General Aviation Aeroplanes) Regulations, 2018 (Legal Notice No. 165) add, under regulation 15, the specific instrument, equipment and flight-document requirements for the general-aviation aeroplanes that make up most training fleets.
What none of these publicly available instruments spell out, at least not in the detail FAR 91.213 does, is the precise mechanical process for placarding and deferring one specific inoperative item on one specific aircraft.
That detail lives somewhere else: in your school's own KCAA-approved Operations Manual and Maintenance Control Manual. ICAO Annex 6, the standard KCAA's own regulations align against, requires every operator to employ a system of continuing airworthiness overseen under a maintenance control manual accepted by the regulator.
If you want to know exactly how your school is permitted to defer a defect, the honest answer is not a regulation number you can look up for free. It is a conversation with the accountable manager or chief instructor, asking to see the document that actually governs it.
The crew that misread their own MEL
In February 2004 a Dassault Falcon 900EX, registration VP-BMS, departed Kilimanjaro International Airport with a known fault: the number one hydraulic pump caution light had been coming on intermittently.
Engineering support at Kilimanjaro was limited, and the crew believed the fault was covered for continued dispatch under their Minimum Equipment List. They chose to defer it and deal with it back at their home base in Luton.
They were wrong about what the MEL actually permitted. The UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch's subsequent report, published in AAIB Bulletin 6/2005, found the crew had misapplied the document they thought was protecting them.
On the return leg the caution light stopped flickering and stayed on. Approaching Luton the landing gear would not indicate down and locked, even after both normal and emergency extension, and the crew diverted to Stansted.
During the landing roll the right main gear partially retracted. The aircraft veered off the paved surface and came to rest around 139 metres from the runway centreline.
Nobody was badly hurt, and the AAIB's investigation led to four separate safety recommendations. But the sequence is the clearest illustration available of the actual failure mode behind "it's on the MEL": not recklessness, but a crew confidently applying a document they had not read carefully enough.
Here is the detail worth sitting with. A professional long-range business jet crew, flying out of an East African aerodrome, with an actual approved MEL in the aircraft, still got the deferral wrong.
A Kenyan student flying a C172 with no MEL document anywhere on board has nothing official to misread. What they have instead is someone's verbal assurance, which is a worse foundation, not a better one.
Three different things people mean by "it's fine"
Pilots and instructors use the same casual phrase for at least three genuinely different situations, and the difference matters.
A deferred defect is one that has actually gone through the process: identified, evaluated by a pilot or mechanic against the flight being flown, deactivated or placarded, and logged. That is a legitimate, legal status, not a loophole.
A missed defect is one an inspection should have caught and did not. The NTSB's final report (docket ERA24FA157) into a 2024 training accident at Fort Pierce, Florida, found a worn and loose throttle component on a Piper PA-44, present but uncaught during an inspection carried out the previous day, contributed to a total loss of thrust when the student advanced the throttles during a multi-engine training exercise.
Nobody deferred that fault on purpose. The inspection process simply did not find it, which is a different failure from choosing to fly with a known issue.
A rumoured defect is the one that should worry you most. Someone mentioned it in the crew room, nobody wrote it down, and nobody with the authority to make the call has actually evaluated it against anything.
It has not been through FAR 91.213(d)'s process, it is not in the tech log, and it is not covered by whatever your school's Maintenance Control Manual actually requires. It exists only as something somebody said.
What a real deferral should look like at a Kenyan school
Strip the regulation language away and the no-MEL process asks four honest questions, in order.
- Is the item actually required for this flight? Required instruments, required equipment for the airspace and conditions, and anything the aircraft's own type certificate depends on cannot be deferred under this process at all.
- Has someone qualified actually evaluated it? That means a certificated pilot or a person authorised to perform maintenance, not a fellow student's confident guess.
- Is it deactivated or removed, and placarded? A sticky fuel gauge that someone taps and ignores is not the same as a fuel gauge properly placarded inoperative with a cross-check procedure briefed.
- Is it logged? If it is not written down, none of the previous three steps actually happened as far as the next pilot is concerned.
Every one of those steps produces a document. None of them produces a sentence starting with "it's probably fine because."
Ask to see the document, not the summary
A tech log and a placarded item answer two different questions, and conflating them is easy to do. The tech log tells you what has already happened to this airframe and what was fixed, cleared, or left open.
A placard and its logbook entry tell you what is allowed to still be broken right now, and under exactly what conditions.
Before you accept any aircraft, both deserve a direct look rather than a verbal summary. "It's fine, someone looked at it" is not a fact you can check.
A placard with a dated, signed logbook entry is.
Why shared training fleets make this worse, not better
A busy Wilson Airport trainer might fly six or seven sorties a day across three different instructors and a dozen students. That is efficient for the school and dangerous for institutional memory.
Every handover between pilots is a point where "I mentioned it to the next person" quietly becomes the entire safety process, instead of a paper trail anyone can check.
The fix is not complicated, and it does not require a new regulation. It requires an instructor who checks the placards and the log before every single lesson, visibly, so a student learns that this is normal professional behaviour rather than something only a nervous person would ask about.
A school culture where asking "can I see what's actually placarded on this one today" feels awkward has already lost the argument before anything breaks.
What pilots admit on the forums
Maintenance threads on pilot forums follow a familiar pattern whenever someone asks about a specific squawk. Several replies insist it is a known quirk of the type and nothing to worry about, and a smaller number insist it should have grounded the aircraft outright.
What is more consistent, buried further down those threads, is pilots admitting they accepted an aircraft on someone else's word rather than checking the paperwork themselves, and only afterwards realised there was no actual placard or log entry behind what they had been told.
Nobody ever frames that admission as the moment they got lucky, even though that is exactly what it was. The honest version of the story is always smaller and less dramatic than a crash: a flight completed normally on an assumption that happened, this time, to be correct.
The Short Version
- A Minimum Equipment List is an approved, aircraft-specific document, and most light trainers, in Kenya and elsewhere, simply do not have one.
- FAR 91.213(d) gives small non-turbine aircraft a separate, simpler route: evaluate, deactivate or placard, and log. Skipping any step means the deferral never legally happened.
- Kenyan regulation (Legal Notices 90, 131 and 165) sets the duties and baseline equipment; the exact deferral mechanics for your fleet live in your school's approved Maintenance Control Manual, not in a free public document.
- The Falcon 900EX crew out of Kilimanjaro shows that even a professional crew with an actual MEL can misapply it. A verbal "it's probably covered" with no document behind it at all is a weaker position, not a safer one.
- Deferred, missed, and rumoured are three different things. Only the first one is legal, and only a placard with a logbook entry proves which one you are actually looking at.
AngaBrief's risk engine treats a known aircraft defect as a hard override on the Aircraft line of PAVE, forcing the assessment to do_not_fly regardless of every other factor's score. The tool can only see what gets entered honestly; it never makes the go or no-go call itself, which stays with the pilot in command and their instructor, as it always must.
Key Takeaways
- Most training aircraft have no approved MEL at all, so "it's on the MEL" is usually not even a sentence that applies.
- A legal deferral under FAR 91.213(d) requires evaluation, deactivation or placarding, and a logbook entry. Missing any one of those means it has not actually happened.
- Your school's Maintenance Control Manual, not a public regulation, sets the exact deferral process for your fleet. Ask the accountable manager to see it.
- A placard with a dated, signed log entry is a fact you can check. A verbal "it's fine" is not, however confidently it is said.