The MITRE Corporation’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development is recruiting pilots for a study evaluating proposed changes to runway standards at general aviation airports.
The study will examine whether or not infrastructure standards, such as runway width and length, pavement markings, visual guidance systems and edge lighting, can be changed to accommodate satellite-based instrument approach procedures, such as Localizer Performance with Vertical Guidance (LPV) approaches, to those runways that don’t currently support low-visibility procedures.
The five-hour research evaluation will take place at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and involves four hours of simulator time. Coordinators are looking for a representative sample of pilots across all age categories and certificate types (private, commercial and ATP) who can legally fly a Cessna 172 in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). Although travel expenses will not be covered, pilots will be paid for their participation.
Pre-flight questionnaires on a pilot’s previous experience must be completed before starting the evaluation, and participants must have had a flight review within the last two years, be current instrument rated pilots, have at a minimum four hours experience using glass cockpit displays and speed tapes with a current medical certificate without a night flight or a color signal control restriction.
The data collected during this study will be de-identified prior to analysis and reporting. Individual pilots and their input will not be identifiable.
You don’t need a MITRE/Embry Riddle study to know the answer to that question. The answer is “of course” FAA criteria needs to be changed and simplified for GA ops. FAA criteria for GA airports is horribly out of date, and inappropriate. Just look at the example of the massive expansion of use of large ill-placed completely unnecessary taxiway and runway marking signs at GA airports, that are more of an obstruction hazard to GA aircraft and gliders than they are needed or any help. At these kinds of GA airports, now complying with modern FAA criteria for taxiway and runway markings needed only for mega-jet transport airports in Cat III is just ruining perfectly fine Army and Navy air fields that were safely used for over a half century. Further, FAA should now be keying to using modern RNP based procedures at GA airports anyway, and not the obsolete angular straight-in criteria LPV procedures, which now just unnecessarily waste airspace, and set GA back even further, for future airspace access, and unnecessary cost allocation.