Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) President Mark Baker reinforced his message that medical and certification reform are critical to the future of general aviation during a U.S. House of Representatives Aviation Subcommittee roundtable held April 30.
Baker told the panel that GA needs support from Congress in order to grow — support in the form of passage of the Pilot’s Bill of Rights 2, which includes third-class medical reform — as well as regulatory changes that will make it easier and less expensive to produce smarter aircraft and install modern safety equipment in legacy aircraft.
He added that general aviation has made “great strides in terms of safety in recent decades, and that continued safety improvements will come from additional education and technological advances, not from government regulation or oversight.”
Baker also noted the educational efforts of the AOPA Air Safety Institute, which produces hundreds of free education and analysis products aimed at improving GA safety.
He also pointed to recent successful industry-government collaborations that have led to changes in the pilot certification process, efforts to reduce loss of control accidents, and regulations to help safety integrate unmanned aircraft into the national airspace system.
Baker delivered similar testimony two days earlier at a U.S. Senate Aviation Subcommittee hearing on GA safety.
Both the roundtable and the hearing are part of the FAA reauthorization process, in which Congress will set long-term funding for the FAA.
In addition to Baker and subcommittee members, the roundtable included representatives of the NTSB, the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General’s office, the Regional Airline Association and of the Families of Continental Flight 3407.
Its about time that someone takes the bull by the horns and
steers GA in a sensible direction
Excellent input by AOPA’s Mark Baker!!!
FAA’s seriously flawed over-specified and poorly conceived equipment and operating criteria now serve as a key global impediment to safety and efficiency advances, as opposed to a facilitator, for both advancing flight operations capability and airspace access, as well as successfully progressing an affordable effective NextGen (even RTCA Task Force 4 recognized this FAA failure issue decades ago).
From poorly conceived and counterproductive FAA UAV criteria (UAV integration globally is inevitable – they just need to always be electronically seen), to the ADS-B excessive cost and ineffective C-N-S design debacle (counterproductive and dysfunctional UAT and ADS-R), to obsolete unneeded WAAS ($4B) and airspace wasting straight-in angular criteria LPV (there are vastly better ways with less expensive and superior RNP), to foot dragging on airman medical certification reform (the long unneeded over-specified 3rd Class),… FAA has simply “lost it”. Their IRU has tumbled.
So it is now time again for fundamental change, just like “post Grand Canyon” era in 1956 when FAA was originally born. Hopefully Congress and the aviation industry will take the lead this fall, and completely reconfigure, reconstitute, and rebuild FAA, from the foundation up, both in ATS and AVS, finally re-incorporating aviation operationally experienced and technically qualified people, who have at least some modicum of vision and wisdom, about where global aviation and its infrastructure needs to head.