Qualifying technicians on the Sabine-Neches: hours, exams and the written practice

Certification is issued by an employer, not by ASNT

This is the sentence that most often surprises technicians and QA managers alike, and getting it wrong is the single most common error on competitor pages about NDT certification. ASNT SNT-TC-1A is a recommended practice. It is guidance an employer adopts, and the moment the employer adopts it, the employer's own written practice becomes the controlling document. ASNT does not certify a Level I or Level II technician against it. The employer does, through its designated Level III.

ASNT does certify individuals directly under its own central programmes, notably the ASNT NDT Level III certificate and the ACCP scheme, and it examines industrial radiographers under IRRSP. Those are separate from SNT-TC-1A and should never be conflated with it. A technician who says they are ASNT certified as a Level II under SNT-TC-1A has described something that does not exist.

ISO 9712 inverts the model entirely. Under ISO 9712 an independent certification body, accredited to ISO/IEC 17024, examines the candidate and issues the certificate, and that certificate belongs to the individual. It stays valid when they change jobs. What the new employer still has to do is authorise the person to work on its own procedures, which is a shorter step than a full re-certification. On the Gulf Coast the employer-based model dominates, so the rest of this page follows it while flagging where ISO 9712 differs.

What the written practice must actually state

A written practice is not a policy statement. It is an operating document, and an auditor reads it looking for specific content. It must state its scope and the methods and levels covered, and it must name the edition of SNT-TC-1A or CP-189 it is written to. It must define the education, training and experience required for each level in each method, and where those requirements differ from the recommended values it must say so explicitly rather than silently.

It must describe the training course outlines used, the composition and grading of the general, specific and practical examinations, who administers and grades them, and who the certifying authority is. It must state the qualification route for the Level III, the vision requirements and their frequency, the recertification interval, the rule for interruption of service, the technical performance evaluation used at recertification where applicable, and the record retention arrangements.

It should also address the awkward cases that come up constantly on the Gulf Coast: how outside or subcontracted personnel are handled, how limited certification is granted where a technician is qualified for a specific technique rather than a full method, and what happens on suspension, revocation and reinstatement. A practice that is silent on these does not fail on the day it is written. It fails the first time a client auditor asks how the contract technician standing in the unit was authorised.

Training and experience hours, and how they are counted

The tabulated hours are where most of the confusion lives. Organised training means structured instruction with a defined outline, an instructor and a record, not time spent watching someone work. Experience means hours actually performing or directly assisting with the method, logged and signed. The two columns are counted separately, and the training hours do not count as experience hours.

For a candidate with a high school diploma, SNT-TC-1A tabulates forty hours of organised training and two hundred and ten hours of method experience for ultrasonic, radiographic and eddy current Level I, with a further forty hours of training and six hundred and thirty hours of experience for Level II. The surface methods are much lighter: magnetic particle Level I at twelve hours of training and seventy hours of experience, penetrant at four and seventy, visual at eight and seventy. The document also tabulates reduced figures for candidates who have completed engineering or science study beyond high school, and the written practice states which column the employer applies.

Two counting rules trip people up. First, there is a separate minimum for total experience across all NDT methods, in addition to the in-method figure, so a technician cannot reach Level II in a surface method on surface-method hours alone if the total requirement is not met. Second, an hour worked counts once. A technician who spends an eight-hour shift doing penetrant and magnetic particle cannot log eight hours against each. Experience logs that total more hours than the person was on site are the fastest way to lose an audit.

General, specific and practical: what the three examinations test

The general examination covers the principles of the method and is drawn from the published topical outlines. The specific examination covers the employer's own equipment, procedures, techniques and the codes and acceptance criteria applied on that employer's work, which is precisely why a certificate from another employer is not portable. The practical examination requires the candidate to set up and calibrate the equipment, apply the technique to specimens containing real discontinuities, evaluate what they find against acceptance criteria, and write the report.

The practical is graded against checkpoints, and a well-run examination weights the report heavily. In a real Gulf Coast turnaround the technician's report is the only thing the inspector and the engineer ever see, so a candidate who finds every flaw and writes an ambiguous report has demonstrated a real deficiency. Specimens should contain a known set of discontinuities, some acceptable and some not, so that the candidate has to make evaluation decisions rather than simply find things.

For Level III, the structure changes: a basic examination covering materials, processes, other methods and the certification documents themselves, plus a method examination. Where the written practice is written to CP-189, the Level III must additionally hold the ASNT NDT Level III certificate in that method.

Vision, recertification and interruption of service

Vision is checked annually. The usual criterion is Jaeger Number 1 type, or an equivalent, at not less than twelve inches in at least one eye, corrected or uncorrected, plus demonstrated ability to distinguish and differentiate the colours used in the methods performed. The record needs a date, a result and a signature from whoever administered it. Expired vision records are among the most common findings precisely because nobody owns the calendar for them.

Recertification intervals are stated in the written practice. Current SNT-TC-1A guidance recommends a maximum of five years, while older editions used a shorter interval for Levels I and II, so what actually applies to a given technician is whatever their employer's practice says. Recertification is by examination or by a documented technical performance evaluation, again as the practice defines it.

Interruption of service is the rule nobody remembers until a technician comes back from a year on another trade. The written practice must define what constitutes an interruption and what is required to reinstate. On the Sabine-Neches, where technicians move between turnarounds, construction projects and offshore rotations, this clause gets exercised far more often than it does in a fabrication shop.

SNT-TC-1A, CP-189 and ISO 9712 are three different animals

SNT-TC-1A is a recommended practice. It gives the employer latitude, and everything hinges on the written practice. ANSI/ASNT CP-189 is a standard. It is more prescriptive, it removes much of that latitude, and it requires the Level III to hold ASNT NDT Level III certification rather than being qualified in-house. Contracts that specify CP-189 do so precisely to close that gap, and a supplier who has been running a home-qualified Level III has a real problem the day that contract is signed.

ISO 9712 is central third-party certification. An accredited body examines and certifies; the certificate carries the individual's name and travels with them. It sets its own training hours and industrial experience durations by level and method, expressed in months of experience rather than hours, and validity runs in five-year cycles with renewal on evidence of continued activity and vision, and a fuller recertification at the ten-year point.

Aerospace adds a fourth document, NAS 410, which governs personnel qualification for aerospace primes and their supply chains and again differs in its requirements. A Port Arthur employer working refinery, LNG and occasional aerospace-adjacent fabrication may need its written practice to address more than one of these, and the practice should be explicit about which work falls under which scheme.

Who imposes these requirements in Port Arthur

Port Arthur and the wider Sabine-Neches corridor concentrate an unusual amount of the demand. The Motiva refinery is the largest in the United States by crude capacity, and Valero Port Arthur and the TotalEnergies refinery sit alongside it. Petrochemical capacity runs from the BASF TotalEnergies complex through the Golden Triangle polymers investment upriver in Orange. LNG has added a second wave: Golden Pass at Sabine Pass and the Port Arthur LNG development have put large mechanical construction workforces on the ground alongside the existing operating plants.

Every one of those owners imposes personnel qualification requirements on its NDT suppliers through the contract, and most audit them. The audit is usually a documentation audit of the supplier's written practice and personnel files, sometimes followed by a witnessed practical. The service companies feeling that pressure are the turnaround and inspection contractors that staff the corridor, plus the mechanical contractors, tank and vessel fabricators, and the marine repair yards on the waterway.

There is a second layer for radiography. Texas is an NRC Agreement State, so industrial radiography is licensed and the radiographers themselves must be certified through a recognised certifying entity in addition to holding their NDT method certification. A supplier planning to shoot film or digital radiography in Jefferson County needs the licence, the written practice and the radiographer certifications all lined up, and they are three separate pieces of paper.

The findings that recur in Gulf Coast client audits

The same handful of findings appear year after year. A written practice that references SNT-TC-1A without stating an edition, so nobody can tell which set of recommended values the certifications were issued against. Deviations from the recommended hours applied in practice but never listed in the practice. Practical examination records that record a pass but not the specimens, the checkpoints or the grade breakdown. Experience logged in days or in weeks rather than in hours, which cannot be reconciled to the tabulated requirement.

Then the personnel-file findings. Vision records more than twelve months old. A certification signed by a Level III whose own certificate expired before the signature date. Technicians working a technique their certification does not cover, such as encoded corrosion mapping under a plain manual thickness certification, without a limited certification or an authorisation on file. Outside contract technicians on site with no documented acceptance route into the host's written practice.

None of these are competence problems and all of them are expensive. The technician stands down, the scope slips, and the client's confidence in the whole supplier takes a hit that outlives the finding. The fix is almost always a written practice that is honest about what the company actually does, plus one person who owns the records calendar.

Getting a programme in place, or fixing one that just failed

Atlantis works both ends of this. On the training side, we deliver Level I and Level II courses in ultrasonic, radiographic, magnetic particle, penetrant, eddy current and visual testing, along with phased array and time-of-flight diffraction, in classroom, on-site corporate and blended formats, with examinations structured as general, specific and practical and graded to the client's written practice. On the certification-programme side, we write and review written practices, build the training course outlines and examination banks, and provide the ASNT Level III who reviews qualification files and signs certifications where the client's practice allows an outside Level III to serve in that role.

If a client audit has just gone badly, the useful first step is a gap review of the written practice against the personnel files as they actually stand, because those two documents almost never match. Training and consulting are affordable, accessible and fully customisable to the site's procedures, codes and workforce. Contact info@atlantisndt.com for a consultation or a scoped quote.

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