Abstract: Airworthiness standards, forged through blood and lives, govern the entire civil aircraft development process and define the safety baseline for civil aviation. Airworthiness standards impose extremely stringent safety requirements on technical standards, with a minimum safety threshold of 10-9 —any failure in a standard clause may lead to catastrophic consequences including aircraft destruction and loss of life. Moreover, since airspace functions as a globally unified market without regional protectionism or graduated entry mechanisms, latecomer countries must meet, from the outset, the same rigorous safety standards as those long-established nations. These extreme constraints create a fundamental dilemma: latecomers must simultaneously conform to existing international standards for market acceptance while breaking through established frameworks to meet unique domestic needs. How to resolve this dilemma has become an urgent question for management research. This study selects AC313 helicopter—the world’s first to achieve full-domain plateau-plain airworthiness and obtain both domestic and international certification—as a representative case. Using a longitudinal case study method, we investigate the mechanisms underlying airworthiness standards innovation in latecomer countries. Key findings include: (1) To overcome the barrier nature of airworthiness standards, latecomers must build an adaptive innovation pathway driven by conventional scenarios, achieving proactive internalization of existing standards through “deconstructing standard principles-integrating resources across platforms-compliance verification,” thus laying the foundation for original breakthroughs. (2) To meet the scientific rigor of airworthiness standards, latecomers must build a breakthrough innovation pathway driven by special scenarios, constructing original standards through “forward design-integrating industry-university-research resources-feasibility verification,” thus providing technological support and expanded application domains. (3) An ambidexterity mechanism emerges between these two pathways: adaptation provides the scientific basis for breakthroughs, while breakthroughs expand the capability boundaries for adaptation. The two are organically unified, jointly enabling standards innovation in latecomer countries. This study offers theoretical guidance and practical insights for latecomers pursuing innovation in high-technology standards domains.

Key words: airworthiness standards, standards innovation, ambidexterity, AC313 large civil helicopter