Avweb blog - How the FAA Works Against Safety

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August 29, 2010 How the FAA Works Against Safety

By Paul Bertorelli

I know by firsthand experience that AVweb finds its way into the upper reaches of the FAA's HQ at 800 Independence Avenue in Washington. What I don't know is this: Do the gentle people inhabiting FAA's mahogany row have a clue of how their lower minions are carrying out their jobs? Do they have even the vaguest control over the far flung offices? Do they even care? Would they be surprised to know that the FAA's actions are sometimes counter safety?

Here's where I'm going with this. For Aviation Consumer, I've been doing some extensive research on LED lighting, specifically landing lights. This is, by the way, fabulous technology. It's improving in leaps and bounds, it's getting ever cheaper and is becoming a significant market force in the general lighting market. Yet the FAA has done its level best to keep these benefits from trickling down to aviation.

Here's how: All of the manufacturers of these products have approached the FAA for some kind of approval, even though it's not clear that any is needed. The FARs are vague on the subject, requiring only that bulbs have enough light for night operations and not present a fire hazard. That's it. The venerable GE 4509 bulb—the gold standard for landing lights—carries no TSO or PMA of any kind. It's just a bulb.

Yet, say the makers of LEDs, they are often asked by regional FAA ACO offices to conduct a battery of tests on LED products to prove…to prove what? A reading of the FARs would suggest all they need to prove is that the bulb generates sufficient light and isn't a fire hazard. Even basic common sense knowledge of LEDs can answer these questions without requiring expensive tests, which one manufacturer told me ran to high five figures and it still doesn't have the approval.

Another said its ACO insisted that the LED behave just like a 4509--same too-narrow asymmetric beam width and same mounting notch in the rim (wholly unnecessary). When I asked if this didn't dumb down potentially improved technology to the limitations of the old, I was told that...why yes, it does.

Yet another company told me its ACO refused to approve a LED bulb, refused to explain how such a product could be tested and approved and then said it was too busy to take on the project anyway. This has forced some companies to shop for ACOs that have a more realistic approach to the FAA's oversight and safety role. What that involves is an ACO culture that lucidly balances benefit against risk. In other words, any fool with a lick of sense would know that LEDs are a huge improvement over failure-prone incandescent bulbs and the risk of them causing any harm to the aircraft is too trivial to worry about.

It's probably not unreasonable to ask a manufacturer to do simple RFI trials. But even that might be overkill. At the FSDO level, some offices routinely approve Form 337 requests (good for them) for LED installs while others refuse, for no imaginable reason other than they can.

Where the FAA's actions turn strikingly counter safety is that if more LEDs were out there, pilots would tend to leave them on constantly, thus improving conspicuity and reducing the risk of mid-airs. Moreover, LEDs can easily be configured as always-on flashers—some of the products out there do that. Yet manufacturers have been reluctant to pursue the flasher approach because it complicates an already Byzantine—and entirely unnecessary—approval process. So the bottom line is, thanks to FAA actions, valuable safety technology is kept from the market for no particular reason other than bureaucratic intransigence. Even when it does make it to market, it is more expensive by dint of the make-work testing.

And by the way, if I wanted one of these LEDs for a certified airplane—and I do—I'd simply install it, approval or not. My interpretation of the FARs indicates I'm in compliance if the lamp provides sufficient light and doesn't present a fire hazard. I deem myself smart enough to determine both. Furthermore, since there's no such thing as an approved landing light bulb anyway, I'm miles away from the stench of unapproved parts. Like I said, common sense. There are little capillaries of it in the FAA, but the veins run dark with baffling illogic and flawed thinking.

Southwest Airlines Will Add Second New York City Airport With Newark Slots

By Mary Schlangenstein and Mary Jane Credeur - Aug 27, 2010 4:58 PM ET

Southwest Airlines Co. will add a second New York City-area airport, New Jersey's Newark, under an agreement to lease space for 18 daily round trips from merger partners Continental Airlines Inc. and United Airlines.

Flights would start in March, with a full schedule in place by June, according to a statement today from Southwest, the largest discount carrier. The plan is contingent on Continental and United closing their merger by Nov. 30 and on U.S. approval.

The accord lets Southwest achieve its goal of expanding in New York after failing to obtain room for more than eight daily flights at LaGuardia. The regional footprint of Houston-based Continental and UAL Corp.'s United would shrink as federal regulators assess their pending tie-up.

"This gives Southwest a foothold on both sides of the Hudson River," said Bob Mann, a former American Airlines executive who runs consultant R.W. Mann & Co. in Port Washington, New York. "Those are both high-revenue, high- spending markets, and business in New York fans out in all directions."

Southwest, based in Dallas, said it hasn't determined what cities it will serve from Newark or the timing of those routes.

Mann said the 18 round trips give Southwest a "critical mass" at Newark, and said the carrier's low-fare strategy will be a "price depressant" in markets where the airline overlaps with competitors.

Continental and its regional partners account for almost 64 percent of passengers at Newark. Continental and United now operate 442 daily round trips into and out of Newark, and said they plan to continue service to all destinations.

Continental and Chicago-based United announced on May 3 that the two carriers would merge, a process they expect to complete by year's end. The combined airline will be the world's biggest, surpassing Delta Air Lines Inc.

To contact the reporters on this story: Mary Schlangenstein in Dallas at maryc.s@bloomberg.net;Mary Jane Credeur in Atlanta 

Tell your Senators to pass FAA Reauthorization

Everyone should be placing personal phone calls to their Senators insisting on the passage of the FAA Reauthorization bill before the current extension ends on September 30th.

The passage of this legislation is essential to maintaining the positive collaborative environment we are beginning to see in FAA.

This legislation has been held up for about 4 years and it needs to be finished.

I urge you all to make the calls.

Bergen Record editorial

Still crowded up there

Monday, August 9, 2010

THE RECORD

A YEAR has passed since the terrible midair crash of a tourist helicopter and a small plane above the Hudson River.

Buy this photo

The sky over Teterboro Airport.

During the stunned weeks that followed, there were calls for change and promises of improvement. One of the most glaring problems was the unstructured airspace in an extremely congested area. Another was lagging technology. And disgruntled and underpaid air traffic controllers provided a third reason to worry.

Fortunately, there have been some good outcomes. Because of subsequent changes, investigators have looked into a quarter as many safety incidents in the state as they did last year, Staff Writer Tom Davis reported. And Teterboro Airport has been free of safety investigations since last August. That is heartening news. For six years, modest Teterboro racked up more than two times the number of investigations as its much bigger New York colleagues, La Guardia and John F. Kennedy International airports.

We are concerned, however, that the number of New Jersey's air traffic controllers has remained steady when it should have increased. And that the pay hasn't changed, either. An air traffic controller in one of the busiest metropolitan areas in the country makes less than controllers in Atlanta and Philadelphia.

"Who the hell wants to come to New Jersey and make less than they do somewhere else?" asked Ray Adams, president of the Newark chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

A reasonable question. And a tough one to address, since layoffs in the private and public sectors are rampant. But passenger and pilot safety is nothing to toy with, and something needs to be figured out.

Until glitches are fixed in a new satellite system, radar will continue to be used to monitor the area around the crash. But with the metropolitan area's tall buildings and ragged skyline, radar does not always track at lower heights. Which means a year later, the danger is still there.

We understand that advances in technology can be slow, and that problems must be worked out as much as possible before new surveillance is put in place. No one wants a faulty tracking system, rushed into place before it is ready, that will lead to more awful collisions. But there must be a stopgap measure put in place in the meantime.

The National Air Disaster Alliance, which represents pilots and travelers, wants the Federal Aviation Administration and others to create a master plan that describes in detail the problems affecting planes before departure and arrival. That is a good start. But we need to do more, and sooner rather than later.

"There are a lot of systemic problems right now," the president of the National Air Disaster Alliance told The Record. "Hopefully it doesn't take any more people being killed to get them to fix it."

Exactly.

 

Ray Adams

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