I'm usually not anti-government, but the FAA has absolutely lost its way and is causing far more harm than good nowadays. Look at lead in avgas. The Boeing fiascos. Inability and cost of innovating in the space. America is being left behind in global aviation.
You're upset with the FAA for the Boeing fiasco, but simultaneously upset that they are going to be more strict with certifying a new class of aircraft?
Why not? One of the main failure modes of bureaucracy is escalating attempts to deflect blame for both individuals and the organization as a whole, where all that leads to a nightmare of red tape that pulls against the original intent of the organization. So you have a bunch of rules and strictness plus a bunch of snafus.
“Be indiscriminately more strict” obviously isn’t the thing to do. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a federal oversight organization be actually-effective at overseeing the industry it’s tasked with overseeing. Be strict enough in smart ways to catch real problems before they happen, might be one way to think of the ideal mandate.
The FAA allowed Boeing to self certify, so they have blame in that. Strict regulations are not necessarily a bad thing if they are actually needed, but regulations for regulation's sake to keep the agency with a purpose is definitely bad. At some point the bueracracy takes over, and it's hard to avoid the useless regulations that make it look like things are being done but ignore the true things needing regulation.
The correct approach is to reward new things, reward changes and innovation, and punish massively anything that causes an accident putting lives at risk.
For example, make a fund that any aircraft manufacturer pays fines into. Fines for engine failures. Fines for oxygen mask deployments. Fines for crash landings. Massive fines for deaths. Aim to fine about 50% of the value of all aircraft sold.
Then give the pot of those fines back to aircraft designers and operators per passenger mile safely flown.
Overall, the industry gets the same amount of cash. But manufacturers and operators who manage to do it more safely will end up more profitable.
You also need a system of watchdogs who try to find 'coverups' - ie. times where a safety procedure is skipped to avoid the fine. A combination of whistleblower rewards and automatic data reporting from the plane should help with that issue.
As a pilot, I can't see any reason to fine for an oxygen mask deployment at all and very little reason to fine for an engine failure resulting a safe landing (which is the incredibly overwhelming majority of them in airline transport category aircraft). That would be like fining a driver for a hard braking incident or triggering their ABS.
Not everything needs to have an economy created out of it.
An engine failure resulting in a safe landing was only one or two more failures away from a deadly incident.
When you have multiple layers of safety, having one or two fail is a 'close call' that should be engineered to happen less frequently, and ideally never.
That's the thing. Having one engine shutdown is not a "close call" in a mathematical or engineering sense. The failure rate for revenue service transport category aircraft is well studied. The failure rates are in the 10⁻⁷ to 10⁻⁶ per flight order of magnitude.
In multi-engine turbine transport-category aircraft, an engine shutdown rarely results in a mishap. Extremely rarely. If the goal is safety, shutting down a possibly misbehaving engine is safety enhancing over an alternate system where an engine shutdown results in meaningful fines and so there would be pressure to not shutdown an engine that should be shutdown (or a delay in making the decision to do so).
I'll have to double-check this later, but I think if you took a 50 mile drive to the airport, got on a flight that had an engine failure at V1, and drove 50 miles back to your house that you were at a greater risk during the 100 miles of driving than during that worst-case single-engine shutdown flight. (They're order of magnitude the same I'm pretty sure. If safety is the goal, how much should each of the people who commuted to that flight be fined for their risk-assumption?)
That sounds a lot like testing in production. Move fast and break things when the stake are human life. I will accept a slower pace of aircraft development, thank you.
We could move fast and quickly figure out a new lead free fuel... Or we could keep using our reliable leaded fuel that kills hundreds of people annually.
Sometimes, 'move fast and break things' actually saves lives. Especially when you're moving fast on the development of new safety systems.
eVTOLs are powered lift aircraft, though, so this is moving to certify them under the correct specification. This is a good thing as far as I can see, because the FAA's job isn't to make life easy for innovators, it's to ensure that the technology is safe for everyday use. And quite frankly, that's how it should be; the FAA is the defacto standard for aviation regulation, and I wouldn't want to fly on anything that was incapable of meeting FAA standards. The 737 max fiasco was a major blow to the organization's reputation, and this is a good sign that they're taking their job seriously again, because people died.
The real question should be why they were initially going to certify eVTOLs as light aircraft. That just seems like the entirely wrong category for them.
It's not at all clear to me that the FAA was originally going to certify them under those rules. Note the carefully worded text here:
> developers of winged eVTOL aircraft including Joby Aviation, Archer and Beta Technologies have been proceeding on the assumption that their aircraft would be certified under the FAA’s overhaul of small airplane certification rules that took effect in 2017.
"developers...have been proceeding under the assumption" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence...
Also I don't want anything not properly certified and verified to fly above me. Specially VTOL type crafts. At least with regular planes they have glide characteristics and are not aimed to operate regularly in urban areas outside airports.
I completely agree. From the recent 5G ground radar fiasco (where FCC had already adjudicated the issue) to a chilling case of FAA telling the United States Air Force that they cannot use their allocated spectrum for a Link 16 TRANSEC enhancement because of potential GPS interference.
The USAF should instruct the FAA to pound sand. USAF has the primary spectrum allocation, and is the owner/operator for both systems.
Do you think that aviation regulation is better anywhere else? In Europe it is a mess (particularly for general aviation), in Asia there is hardly any general aviation.
Serious question: what's wrong with lead in avgas?
No one serious would ask what was wrong with tetraethyllead in gasoline fueling automobiles in urban areas, but aviation is a completely different context.
It's completely unnecessary, as it has been shown that general aviation planes can operate on mogas in almost every single propeller engine. Additionally, it costs more over the long run due to the maintenance costs (e.g. spark plug issues from lead build up when you sit at lower RPMs for taxiing).
Lead isn't added to help increase the lifetime of anything. In-fact, that's hilarious, because lead fouls spark plugs and the rest of the engine. I've personally removed spark plugs with pea sized nuggets of lead wedged in the electrode. Problems caused by lead (e.g., stuck valves) are probably the #1 reason you have to overhaul cylinders. Lead is an octane booster, that's it.
"Knocking" is an antiquated term. Knocking = detonation, and any severe detonation would destroy an aircraft engine. For example, this is why we take off with our mixture so rich, to create a huge margin against detonation by lowering internal cylinder pressures.
> > 70% of 100LL aviation fuel is used by the 30% of the aircraft in the general aviation fleet that cannot use any of the existing alternatives
A large part of this problem, AFAIU, is that "cannot use" can mean lack of type certification. IOW, as a practical matter many (most?) pre-existing engines could use new, unleaded fuels, but engine certifications haven't yet been updated by the FAA. Only leaded-fuel is legally permitted in most old engine types, and old engines dominate in general aviation.
See, for example, this blurb further down in that Wikipedia article,
> In 2022, Paul Bertorelli of AVweb reported that the FAA is dragging its feet on broadly certifying G100UL, delaying approval of the fuel for more engines and spending over $80 million on EAGLE to re-start a search for an unleaded fuel when G100UL has been under evaluation for over 10 years.
where G100UL is (I think) the only alternative replacement fuel actually approved so far, certified just last year, and only for one particular family of engines.
Onerous certification incentivizes companies to invent in other countries.
The FAA has become increasing bureaucratic and in many cases it is causing safety issues. Take the recent case where they deemed it illegal to do a low-pass over a private airstrip to assess safety prior to landing.
I'd like to see the FAA do a pass over existing and new regulations to see if they can generalize any of the rules. IE if the concern for safety is due to momentum/potential energy, codify that rather than separate limitations on weight and speed.
>Take the recent case where they deemed it illegal to do a low-pass over a private airstrip to assess safety prior to landing.
I am a big fan of Trent Palmer as well, so I tend to take his side of the story as more likely. However I believe the FAA is arguing that he never intended to land and was just planning to buzz his friend's house. I wasn't there so I don't know what really happened. However I agree, claiming that his landing was "not necessary" so the pre-landing pass was not protected seems very short-sighted.
Here's Trent's video on this if you want to hear his side for yourself:
I'm on Trent's side here as well, but I will also say that I've seen many inspection passes of paved runways. These are often in conjunction with an airport event. (I guess maybe there's an increased risk of a fouled runway during such events and, you know, you can never be too careful...)
I watch a lot of ATC videos on YouTube and these low passes happen a lot in emergency situations. The two scenarios I've seen are:
1) Pilot thinks there may be damage/malfunction and does a low pass so that the Tower/Ground Ops staff can have a look. This was evident in a recent one I saw where the pilot had a nose gear fault. It took two passes, but they were able to confirm that the nose gear was NOT down and were still able to have a successful landing.
2) Student pilot either has mechanical issue or in-plane pilot becomes incapacitated. Tower/remote instructor tells student to do multiple low, slow passes at increasingly lower altitudes and speeds to get used to taking the proper heading and control inputs until the final pass is so low/slow that the landing essentially happens naturally.
I'd be flabbergasted if the FAA bans this type of thing, in both of these cases I personally saw (and I'm sure many others), this procedure saved lives. Why would they ban this?
I think the FAA is trying to root out and punish buzz jobs. I can't imagine they'd take enforcement action on anyone who had an emergency (which both #1 and #2 would fall into).
For non-emergencies, I love watching and hearing a good low pass, but these impromptu displays could get annoying for airport neighbors and they have killed people when someone gets a little too sporty in their display. If the airport Saturday morning breakfast low passes all went away, I'd be slightly sad but it's probably for the best.
Trent's case is an interesting one. I don't know what his actual intent was, but unless it was clearly a show-off-only low pass, I think the FAA should let it go.
The noise complaints are pretty ridiculous. There are no new airports so people knew what they were getting into when purchasing the property, you see the same thing around bars in the city that have been open for 50+ years. This is another case where the FAA has favored politics over safety, many noise abatement procedures involve delaying crosswind turns or other maneuvers that decrease the safety of the pattern. Just like houses have flood zones as required disclosures, maybe we should have airport zone houses where noise is expected.
If low-passes are a significant safety risk, then the FAA should prove as such and write a clear rule specific to it, IE a maximum speed over the runway. All kinds of air safety seminars + CFIs are trying to teach go-around as a normal maneuver that should be practiced regularly and then the FAA basically says a go-around could cost you your license.
I agree it’s entirely out of bounds to complain about noise from operationally necessary aircraft operations (operationally needed for flight, not that the operational need for the flight is subject to review).
I’m a lot more sympathetic to noise complaints against 2700 RPM (prop tips nearly the speed of sound), high-power, low passes that have no operational need.
As far as I understand it, this is less about the amount of energy and more to do with the type of pilot certificate one would need to have.
The majority of pilots are initially rated for the Airplane category with Airplane, Single Engine, Land as the most common class. Powered lift is a completely different category, and so pilots rated for the Airplane category would have to qualify separately, including a certain minimum number of hours with a flight instructor, a certain number of solo hours, cross-country flight distance and a check ride.
This would significantly raise the bar to fly these aircraft. I also don't even know for these eVTOLs whether it'd be credible to do e.g. the cross country flight which requires at least 150 nautical miles of travel, including three full-stop landings, due to the battery lifetime.
Establishing a different pilot certification category would seem reasonable. Powered lift flight involves a transition from vertical to horizontal and back, and that isn't covered in regular pilot training.
A helicopter license only requires a 50 mile cross country flight so I expect the FAA would set a requirement closer to that for powered lift.
It seems obvious that it should require a separate checkride to fly a VTOL aircraft if you have only airplane category ratings. The training for an add-on certificate is not that intensive nor expensive and I think is well-justified.
> Onerous certification incentivizes companies to invent in other countries.
I'm sure there are lots of countries around the world that would bend their aviation rules to whatever whim a company wanted. I'm assuming they don't take advantage of that because of the lack of infrastructure, talent, funding, and a viable commercial market.
No country has the same capital floating around. It's much harder to get funding in Europe. IDK about Asia, but it doesn't look nearly as easy neither.
Yeah, I agree. "Light aircraft" seems to imply that you are passively-stable and can glide to the ground in case of powerplant failure, which can't be true for these things. Powered-lift seems like a more appropriate classification, but I don't have any insight into what the differences in actual requirements are.
Here's what they are. The "small airplane" certification standards [1] are for airplanes. A helicopter is not an airplane. A powered-lift VTOL incapable of gliding is not an airplane.
"The airplane must be controllable and maneuverable, without requiring exceptional piloting skill, alertness, or strength, within the operating envelope ... (despite) flight control or propulsion system failure"
"Continued safe flight and landing means an airplane is capable of continued controlled flight and landing, possibly using emergency procedures, without requiring exceptional pilot skill or strength. Upon landing, some airplane damage may occur as a result of a failure condition."
So you must be able to glide to a landing, or at least a controlled crash, if you lose engine power.
The FAA is correct here. The "eVTOL" class of aircraft based on quadrotor drone technology will fall out of the sky on either a power or control failure. It's worse than a helicopter, which can usually autorotate.
Powered-Lift just means that they aren't using their wing surfaces for lift take-off/landing but are using them for lift during normal flight. They [edit:might] be able to auto-rotate down in the case of a powerplant failure just like a helicopter.
Here is the exact definition:
> (425) Powered-lift. A heavier-than-air aircraft capable of vertical take-off, vertical landing, and low-speed flight that depends principally on engine-driven lift devices or engine thrust for lift during these flight regimes and on non-rotating aerofoil(s) for lift during horizontal flight.
I doubt it. Consider the high wing loading, high drag, and lack of certain control surfaces. Any power loss will result in a quick stall and unrecoverable spin. Most of those powered lift aircraft rely on a mix of redundant systems plus a ballistic recovery parachute for flight safety.
I guess the cutoff is if you can maintain a sink rate low enough to make a landing without killing/severely injuring passengers in an engine-out scenario.
I would expect most of these "scaled up quadcopter" companies to incorporate an emergency parachute system to handle similar to a Cirrus CAPS.
Could someone with an aviation background chime in on what this entails? I would think that VTOL pilot/aircraft certification would be more stricter/tighter than light aircrafts. I wonder if this move was made by the FAA being slightly concerned about the safety, though the AW609 mentioned in the (initial) part of the article is a light aircraft... which raises the question on why VTOL rules weren't applied right from the start.
Side note: why does this website restrict copying text, or even middle-button scrolling?
> which raises the question on why VTOL rules weren't applied right from the start.
I've had limited dealings with the FAA but my overall impression is they struggle to deal with change.
They don't handle medical certifications well—God help you if you take an antidepressant and want to fly a plane, they failed on the 5G-radio altimeter issue, they can't approve a leadless fuel despite having one that passes all their tests and meets their standards, and now this.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Yes, they seem very conservative and often taking a punitive approach, but: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/07/20210728-g100ul.htm... "FAA approves first high-octane unleaded avgas", for medical certification there's now BasicMed, the new light airplane certification standards mentioned in the article are a lot less prescriptive than the old ones, and they're now working on the MOSAIC changes to make special-airworthiness certificate rules more flexible.
BasicMed came from Congress, not the FAA. And true to congressional style, it disproportionately benefits the elderly - it requires you had a valid medical within the past 10 years, which helps if age related health issues stop you from renewing, but not if you were never eligible for one in the first place.
Not true, the requirement is to ever have had a 3rd class medical. So yes, you still need to see a medical examiner once, but after that you never have to again.
And I'd argue it does not benefit the elderly, it benefits everyone. Instead of having to find and pay a hundred bucks to a medical examiner every two years I can now accomplish this by having a chat with my primary physician, which I see anyway, every four years. I think it's hugely beneficial to all recreational pilots.
But you're right in that the FAA had to be forced to do it.
So I looked this up [1] and it turns out we're both wrong - you need to have had a valid medical at some time after 2016-07-14.
That date is exactly 10 years before congress passed the Basic Med law, so when basic med was new, it was "in the last 10 years", but the law pinned it to a specific date, not a specific number of years in the past.
I deal with the FAA regularly and I agree with your overall impression. The people you deal with at the bottom/middle of the organization are incredibly reliant on existing rules/wording that when something new comes up they often seem to lack common sense.
Having ever been diagnosed with ADHD is disqualifying, as is taking any ADHD/psychotropic medication to mitigate the condition. All you can do is take a day-long battery of psych tests to demonstrate that you never had ADHD in the first place.
It’s three or four old SSRIs and that comes with with other caveats and requirements. I’m also a private pilot wannabe and the FAA situation in regard to this is bullshit. Is there a chart somewhere showing how many small planes fall out of the sky due to some dude taking his meds?
> Is there a chart somewhere showing how many small planes fall out of the sky due to some dude taking his meds?
Well, probably. The FAA is the accident investigation authority on the US, if anyone has that chart, it's them. (I know I don't have that information, but last time I worked on a safety related area (not on the US), and worked into getting a relation of causes for accidents, almost no cause had enough accidents linked to it to do any kind of analysis.)
I am personally against strict regulation for general aviation, but most of the eVTOL isn't general aviation (I'm not sure why people are lumping it there).
The major thing is that the FAA loves to approve what someone at the FAA has already previously approved. So if you have parts of the aircraft, avionics, pilot operating manual, performance values, etc that have previously been approved by the FAA then it is much easier to get them approved again because the precedent exists that it is ok. Someone else did all the heavy-lifting to get that first approval signature.
By classifying them as the relatively rare "Powered-lift" category they have created a huge bureaucratic hurdle to overcome. You've gone from thousands of approved airframes to a handful of approved airframes. You can still work through it but there isn't a precedent for them to easily point to for fast approval.
This may even be seen as a warning to investors that the FAA is not going to be laissez faire with regards to regulating aircraft that carry passengers, so companies that are currently trying to skirt regulation are at risk.
The FAA will downright torpedo the entire industry in the name of conservatism.
A lifesaver for Boeing and Airbus to have such a restrictive regulator in the biggest market.
The electric aviation (generally, not just eVTOL) over-regulation is the one that really gets me. The FAA will happily reinforce the status quo of fossil fuel aviation (including the leaded gas fiasco!) than take one iota of risk. Every 4500 tons of CO2 (just ten 777 flights) results in an excess death due to climate change[0], but that’s not the FAA’s problem!
I think this is supposed to be sarcastic, but that's exactly how the FAA sees it. Their job is to prevent people from dying in or because of aircraft and that's it. Environmental concerns are the EPA's domain.
Once the alternative fuels are available and the FAA has determined that they are safe to use it should be EPA pressuring pilots to make the switch.
I do however agree that the FAA is outrageously slow to react to change. They are risk adverse to a excessive degree, but at the same time air travel is the safest way to get around on a per-mile basis, so their approach is working.
My final note is that slow development in eletric aircraft is not entirely the fault of the regulatory environment. There is also the issue of battery technology being a bit insufficient for most uses currently and having bad failure conditions.
The FAA is in a lose-lose position. Be conservative and everyone bitches about how they're holding back progress. Be "flexible" and allow the MAX and everyone rips them a new one saying "they should have known".
The "game theory" move is to allow things in experimental and basically forbid them from passenger travel until some other certification body (EU?) sticks their neck out.
MAX happened because the logical change (tweak the body / landing gear of the plane to accomodate the larger engine) would've been too onerous because of the FAA rules, so they fixed it in a stupid way that complied with the FAA rules.
The airlines were also at least partly at fault in the Boeing 737 MAX debacle. They specifically asked Boeing for an airplane with flight characteristics identical to existing 737NG models so that their pilots wouldn't need new type certification, which is why Boeing came up with MCAS as a flawed solution. Boeing and the FAA should have pushed back on that, and found the flaws earlier, but none of that would have happened if airlines hasn't tried to cheap out.
> The FAA is in a lose-lose position. Be conservative and everyone bitches about how they're holding back progress. Be "flexible" and allow the MAX and everyone rips them a new one saying "they should have known".
It's not one or the other. They can allow innovation and still keep things safe. In fact, it's their job
I hope the FAA and EVTOL companies can work this out and these new rules don't significantly disrupt or destroy such a nascent industry. Of course the aircraft need to be safe but I hope there will still be a clear path for them to become fully certified.
Just look at drones and FAA. That will kill any hopes on working something out. Especially considering that most new eVTOL are really just very large drones, pilot presence notwithstanding.
Anybody noticed that you can't highlight text on this website? When I try to double click, it pops up an "! ALERT: Content is protected !!". Seems like a futile usefulness oversight, especially since if I really need to, I can:
- copy the text via eyeballs->keyboard
- copy the text from the dev console
- take a screenshot and extract the text with Google Photos or something
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Copied (below). I'm on a Mac using Chrome. Not sure if that's relevant.
The Federal Aviation Administration is dramatically revising its approach to certifying electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, injecting new uncertainty into the certification programs of the United States’ leading eVTOL developers.
Although the shift comes as the FAA has been broadly rebalancing its relations with industry since the 737 Max crashes exposed its insufficient oversight of Boeing’s certification programs, this recent move appears more geared toward bureaucracy than safety. Specifically, it is driven by a decision to establish operational rules for eVTOLs as “powered-lift” aircraft — a definition that was originally introduced into federal regulations to cover conventionally powered tiltrotors like the Leonardo AW609, in development for the last two decades.
Related: Approaching first flight, Eviation’s Alice readies to test FAA
Until now, developers of winged eVTOL aircraft including Joby Aviation, Archer and Beta Technologies have been proceeding on the assumption that their aircraft would be certified under the FAA’s overhaul of small airplane certification rules that took effect in 2017. Those performance-based regulations were created out of collaboration with industry and kicked off a wave of new entrants emboldened by the opportunities they created to certify innovative technologies.
Now, the FAA under new Acting Administrator Billy Nolen is reversing course, the agency confirmed to The Air Current, a stunning development that appears to have largely caught the industry off guard.
While the full implications of the shift are unclear, it is likely to rattle investors who had believed that the FAA was working in harmony with industry to provide eVTOL aircraft with a clear route to certification — an impression that Nolen himself bolstered in a recent appearance on 60 Minutes.
This doesn’t effect existing fossil fueled aircraft. Every 4500tons of CO2 results in an excess death due to climate change[0], yet another example of where short-sighted NIMBYism is locking us into climate inaction and the increased death that brings. (Another example being NIMBYism killing electrified transit or High Speed Rail, nuclear power, wind and solar power either directly or via blocking transmission, increased sprawl due to dense housing being blocked, etc.)
All I said was I don't want some poorly engineered EVTOL crashing in my yard. What's that got to do with NIMBY or CO2? Regulation will hopefully prevent disasters. Is it really a NIMBY attitude to ask that a thousand+ pound contraption is thoroughly tested and certified before hovering over populated regions?
Well that's the issue, isn't it? There was no evidence that the previously expected regime meant poorly tested and uncertified (when the opposite is true, which is why such vehicles haven't already been flying here when they've been under testing in New Zealand for years), it was something that you kind of assumed. NIMBYism is also a reflexive siding with harder regulation as obviously necessary without good evidence, entrenching a flawed status quo which doesn't have to meet the same impossible standard.
Move fast and break things (on the lab) is certainly the way to do it. The problem is that breaking things on the lab is expensive, and some companies push it into the normal operation when they already make a profit.
When a rocket is launched out of a remote area to over the ocean, with a self destruct button, I'm not really worried. When a glorified quad copter with cheap LIPOs is over a populated area, I am worried.
