WASHINGTON, D.C. — Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) President Mark Baker told lawmakers Tuesday that the the general aviation industry is under stress made worse by outdated and cumbersome FAA regulations and procedures.
“The regulatory and certification processes used today may have been needed 30 or 40 years ago, but they simply cannot keep pace with today’s rapid changes and improvements in technology,” Baker told the committee Nov. 18 during a hearing on “FAA Reauthorization: Issues in Modernizing and Operating the Nation’s Airspace.” “Changing these processes in ways that lower costs, reduce bureaucracy and improve safety will help grow general aviation. These should be our collective goals.”
The committee will play a critical role in FAA reauthorization, the process of enacting legislation to authorize funding and set policy priorities for the agency, AOPA officials said.
Baker told committee members that third-class medical reform is long overdue, especially given that the requested changes would simply expand an existing FAA standard safely used by Sport Pilots for more than 10 years. He added that medical reform is a top priority for AOPA members and the association is committed to continuing to work on a legislative solution in the next session of Congress.
In other areas, Baker told the panel, the highly prescriptive and inflexible nature of FAA regulations has prevented safety advances from reaching the GA community.
“While the FAA’s desire to create a ‘gold standard’ for safety is admirable, in practice this approach has had the opposite effect,” Baker said. “Allowing products that offer incremental safety improvements to reach the market more quickly would lower costs, simplify flying, and ultimately improve safety for folks flying today and into the future.”
Baker emphasized that funding the FAA through excise taxes collected on fuel, rather than a user-fee system, has proven both efficient and effective. He remarked that the FAA’s nearly $16 billion budget gives the agency sufficient resources to make needed changes in the way it oversees general aviation. The challenge facing the FAA, he said, is to use those resources to meet the needs of stakeholders and improve efficiencies.
“We need the FAA to embrace a system that can keep up with rapidly changing technology; that is comfortable with timely, economical, and incremental safety improvements; and that will actually work to reduce risk today for hundreds of thousands of GA pilots,” Baker said. “When pilots, industry, and the FAA work together we see positive results for general aviation.”
In addition to Baker, the committee heard from Calvin Scovel, III, inspector general of the Department of Transportation, Nicholas Calio, president and CEO of Airlines for America, Captain Lee Moak, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, The Honorable John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable and Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
May we have some details on the RTCA-4 observations? A fair amount of detail is warranted in order to understand the author’s point
@ Mr. Ross, in reply to your question, see RTCA’s Final Report – CTF-4 RTCA Task Force 4 Certification – Summary:
Any improvements in safety, capacity, or efficiency will require some form of change. Prior to operationally implementing the improvement, equipment, procedures, and people will need to be “certified.” Experience, both prior to and during the Task Force, indicate that significant benefits will accrue to the entire aviation community if the process is “systems oriented” and if refinements are made to reduce the time and cost of the process thereby expediting the availability of the operational enhancements. The Final Report of the RTCA Task Force 4 Certification underscores the critical role of certification in achieving FAA’s safety and modernization goals and provides 15 consensus-based recommendations for improving the certification process. Also see RTCA’s website or contact [email protected].
Eliminate the third class medical and I will buy a try gear plane, I currently fly a tail dragger light sport.
I can remember using radar and Loran A to find my way across the ocean in a C130 and today I cannot install a 2 axis autopilot or Garmin G3X in my certified Swift. (legally) Form over substance is the rule
with the FAA.
Thanks again to AOPA for finally starting to seriously take FAA to task for its maintaining a large set of entirely obsolete rules and policies, and a substantially failed regulatory process, across a broad range of issues. For quite some time now, FAA’s approach has often been safety counterproductive, as well as being crippling to the aviation industry and operations. Good examples abound. Worse yet, FAA is still pushing a seriously flawed and ineffective NextGen concept that simply will not work, regardless of forced equipage policies (e.g., WAAS, ADS-B). RTCA’s Task Force 4, with massive industry input, made many of these same failed and obsolete regulatory policy and process observations over a decade ago, while FAA appears to have completely ignored that sound advice.