[timbre1234]

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.

[alexk307]

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?

[pmichaud]

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.

[droopyEyelids]

If I had my way, organizations like the FAA would do a good job, they'd do it efficiently, and they wouldn't be subject to compromising incentives.

I think this is basically what you're saying, too

[hammock]

Regulation is not just on a spectrum with not enough on one end and too much on the other end.

There is an orthogonal dimension that comprises the quality of regulation (good and poor).

Would that more understand this idea.

[dylan604]

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.

[londons_explore]

They're taking the wrong approach to safety...

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.

[sokoloff]

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.

[canadianabanoci]

Many insurance companies put a box in your car and do fine you for that. It is disgusting, but real.

[londons_explore]

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.

[sokoloff]

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?)

FAA studies on the topic:

https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/engin...

https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/engin...

[db65edfc7996]

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.

[londons_explore]

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.

[coderenegade]

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.

[sokoloff]

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...

[Ekaros]

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.

[anonymousiam]

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.

(Aviation Week 2/7/2022 pg. 16)

[FabHK]

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.

[jessaustin]

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.

[elihu]

That sounds a little like this famous skit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

"What do you do to protect the environment in this case?"

"The planes fly outside the environment."

"Into another environment?"

"No, no, they fly beyond the environment. They're not in an environment."

"But it must be somewhere. What's out there?"

"Nothing's out there."

"There must be something out there."

"There's nothing out there. All there is is air, and clouds, and birds."

"And?"

"Twenty thousand tons of tetraethyllead."

"What else?"

"CO2 emissions, CFCs, and about seven hundred 737 Max's. The environment's perfectly safe."

[chaxor]

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).

[Diggsey]

Going to need a citation for those claims...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#Phase-out_of_leaded_avia...

> 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

On the second point: lead is specifically added to help increase the lifetime of components like spark plugs, since it decreases knocking.

[c1yd3i]

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.

https://www.lycoming.com/node/17607

[wahern]

> > 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.