House approves new FAA funding bill; Babbitt confirmed as FAA administrator

The FAA is one step closer to having its funding outlook secured for the next three years now that the U.S. House has passed a funding bill for the agency. While fuel taxes and airline ticket taxes may go up, assuming the Senate passes the same bill, general aviation pilots won’t have to worry about user fees, Government Executive reported. The bill includes $70 billion in infrastructure funding between now and 2012, money that would be split up for airport improvements and air traffic control system upgrades. And in an effort to prevent another impasse situation like that in 2006 that led to hostile relations between the FAA and air traffic controllers, the new funding bill includes requirements that both sides go to neutral mediators if contract talks break down. In related news last week, the Senate confirmed Randy Babbitt as the FAA’s new administrator. Babbitt was once a pilot for Eastern Airlines and was the president of the Air Line Pilots Association for eight years, the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization reported. While the National Association of Air Traffic Controllers has given Babbitt a supportive but cool reception so far, Babbitt says one of his top priorities will be mending labor relations within the FAA.

A regional airline that flies to airports in Florida and the Bahamas could face $1.3 million in fines from the FAA for crew schedules that forced pilots to exceed their daily and weekly duty limits. The FAA is also charging the airline and flight school with installing uncertified air conditioning compressors and other parts in some planes, the Wall Street Journal reported. The airline replaced those parts with certified equipment when the FAA pointed out the problems. The FAA and U.S. House investigators have been looking into scheduling issues at Gulfstream for about a year. Some pilots there said the airline deliberately falsified its records to make it look like pilots were flying within allowable duty hour limits, when it fact they were forced to fly more. But in announcing the potential fine last week, the FAA said the discrepancies apparently emerged when paper flight logs were entered into an electronic database. Gulfstream has 30 days to respond to the FAA’s proposed fine and said it has evidence refuting the FAA’s charges.

With a week to go until a Transportation Security Administration directive aimed at general aviation goes into effect, pilots across the nation are concerned about what the new rules mean and how they will be implemented. There was no public comment period before the TSA rolled out the directive in December, requiring GA pilots based at airports with commercial flights to get special security badges,
the Grand Junction (Colo.) Daily Sentinel reported. The TSA has not provided any reasoning behind the rule. After pilots objected to the rule earlier this year, the agency said it would review comments and make revisions – but so far, there is little indication of what changes will be made. The TSA has said the security directive is needed because of potential threats from terrorists trying to gain access to airports and use light aircraft in future attacks. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, along with other aviation groups, has opposed the directive not only for singling out GA pilots without cause, but also because it puts the burden on local airport officials to conduct background checks and produce security badges without any extra funding.

Responding in part to concerns that the TSA was able to issue a security directive without any public comment period, some U.S. congressmen are backing changes to that agency’s funding bill that would limit how it can use the directives. In a letter to Congress, officials from six major aviation groups said they supported the changes. If the amended bill is approved, it would let the TSA use security directives in legitimate emergencies, but would otherwise require the agency to go through a public review process, just as many other federal agencies must do. Currently, the TSA can summarily issue security directives without first having to conduct a public economic analysis. And security directives aren’t published in the Federal Register. The agency often invokes national security reasons in issuing the directives and generally does not give specific rationale behind the directives.

Scientists studying the ridges on a shark’s body think they have found ways to dramatically cut the skin friction drag on airplane wings. Wind tunnel tests on model wings have shown that using tiny jets to redirect airflow from side to side over portions of a plane’s wing can cut drag by as much as 40 percent, which could in turn make planes 20 percent more fuel efficient, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council said in a news release. The aerodynamic principle at work, called the Helmholtz resonance principle, is similar to blowing across the top of the bottle at the correct angle, which causes air to be pushed in and sucked back out. Scientists at the four United Kingdom universities doing the research hope to have a wing in flight tests by 2012. Airbus is helping to fund the work.

The two pilots flying Continental Connection flight 3407 when it crashed near Buffalo, N.Y., in February may have slept in the crew lounge at Newark before the flight and one commuted overnight from Seattle the night before. Those and other details into the flight emerged during three days of National Transportation Safety Board hearings last week, shining a bright light on the grueling schedules pilots for regional airlines must maintain, the New York Times reported. Colgan Air, which operated the Continental Connection flight, said at the hearings that Capt. Marvin Renslow made about $55,000 per year and that First Officer Rebecca Shaw earned $25,000 annually. But the NTSB calculated, based on the number of hours in her logbook, that Shaw was actually earning just $16,000 per year, since pay is based on the number of hours in the air. The hearing also focused on whether Shaw may have been sick and whether Renslow had ever received training on how the Bombardier Q400’s stick shaker and stick pusher worked – both devices made to prevent a stall. What the cockpit voice recorder transcripts made clear was that both pilots violated sterile cockpit rules during the approach and neither appeared to notice that the plane was loosing airspeed in the seconds before it stalled. The CVR also captured a conversation between the two pilots in which Shaw said she had never flown in icing conditions and was worried about doing so; the plane crashed in an area of light to moderate icing.

Responding to two spin-related accidents since 1998, the FAA is now requiring owners of all Cessna 150s and Cessna 152s to make changes to the rudder – or else install a placard prohibiting acrobatic maneuvers. The AD requires installation of a kit that replaces the rudder stop, rudder stop bumper and some other hardware. It comes partially in response to a 2005 accident in which a student and instructor practicing spins were killed when they were unable to recover from a spin. Investigators found the rudder nut had jammed behind the bumper because a mechanic had installed a part incorrectly. A similar problem occurred in the 1998 accident in Canada. The airworthiness directive gives owners 100 hours of flight time or 12 months, whichever comes first, to make the changes. The FAA expects it will cost each owner $410 in parts and labor to comply with the AD. Though the cost is relatively low, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has objected to the AD all along on the grounds that most problems could be caught by a one-time visual inspection and that the FAA was overreacting. But the FAA argued that the issue is a design problem, not a mechanical one, and that a visual inspection would not be enough.

Officials in Santa Monica, Calif., are violating the terms of federal airport funds and a 1984 agreement by trying to restrict what types of planes can use Santa Monica Airport, the FAA said last week. The city has been trying to keep large jets from landing there, arguing that they could run off the end of the runway and into nearby homes, the Los Angeles Times reported. Offers from the FAA to install arresting devices haven’t done enough to dampen the concerns of residents and officials. City officials enacted the restrictions in late 2007. They ban jets with landing speeds above 139 mph from using the airport. Because of a cease-and-desist letter from the FAA and a court injunction, the ban has never been enforced. An FAA hearings officer said last week the restrictions “unjustly and unreasonably” restrict large planes. The airport improvement funds the airport gets require that it be open to all aviation uses. And a 1984 agreement gives final say on safety issues to the FAA, not the city. No large plane targeted by the city ordinance has ever crashed at the airport. Santa Monica officials aren’t done fighting, though. They will appeal the issue to an FAA administrator and then in federal court if needed.

An Air Force staff sergeant flying a civilian flight from Chicago to Tokyo last month spotted a fuel leak that could have put the plane in dire straits. Staff Sgt. Bartek Bachleda, who is a midair refueling boom operator, had a window seat and noticed fuel streaming out from underneath the wing of the Boeing 747 soon into the flight, the Air Force reported. He shot video of the fuel leak and alerted a flight attendant, who initially was unconcerned. A few minutes later, with fuel continuing to stream out from the wing, Bachleda identified himself as an Air Force officer and told the flight attendant that it was an emergency situation. The captain of the flight came back to Bachleda’s seat and soon after seeing the fuel leak, turned the plane toward San Francisco, where it landed uneventfully. The Air Force did not list the airline Bachleda was flying or the date he flew, though a picture of the fuel leak shows the plane’s winglet painted in United Airlines’ livery. A search of Flight Aware’s previous flight plans shows that on April 18, United flight 881, which flies daily from Chicago O’Hare to Tokyo Narita, made an abrupt turn over the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border for San Francisco instead.

The liquidation of Adam Aircraft and Eclipse Aviation has done little to dissuade the founders of a new very light jet manufacturer from looking to raise $100 million to begin manufacturing their $2 million jet. Stratos Aircraft, based on Bend, Ore., now has a full-size cabin mockup that it plans to unveil at AirVenture later this summer, The Bulletin reported. The carbon-fiber plane would cruise at 400 knots with a range of 1,500 nautical miles, its designers expect. The single-engine VLJ will be able to hold four people at most. While Stratos is now taking refundable $50,000 deposits, no one has signed up to buy the jet yet. Lacking funding right now to finish designing the aircraft and begin building prototypes, Stratos has not released a timeline for testing and aircraft deliveries.