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Dr. Bill Watson wrote:
I have found that most if not all FAA actions can be best described as the FAA is a Public Relations firm for flying in the US. If anybody causes bad PR, they will read their rules absurdely to bust you. If you do not cause bad PR (police reports, civillian complaints, etc) they will happily let you go about your business. If you cause good PR, you can be given get out of jail free cards. It is all about the PR.
That description seems reasonable, though maybe a little too simple. It's important to keep in mind that the FAA, as a regulatory agency, doesn't exist for us, it exists to regulate us, at least theoretically, just like medical boards exist to regulate doctors, insurance departments exist to regulate insurers, and accounting boards exist to regulate accountants. The reality seems a little more complicated, since the regulators tend to wind up working closely with the ones they're regulating, but theoretically the ones who are on "our side" are associations like the AOPA and the EAA. On the other hand, the FAA reports to the executive branch of the federal government, and to a large extent the executive branch decides how good a job they're doing by reading the newspaper and listening to their constituency, so it's not too surprising that the FAA has an incentive to make things flow as smoothly in the aviation world as possible.
David Douglas Winters wrote
The corporate desire to remove our "old" coupes from the sky is but one example. (Nobody is trying to ban all B-52 aircraft, though most are over 50 years old and getting much harder usage than any coupe in history.and the old DC-3 is avoiding attack quite nicely.)
By "corporate desire," do you mean desire by corporations, or desire by the public as a body? If it's by corporations, which ones? Wichita barely builds planes right now, so the GA manufacturers don't seem likely to be doing it. On the other hand, the airlines fly so high they're pretty much above the GA activity, so the only interference would be at the big airports, from which they've pretty much excluded GA anyway.
If anyone's pushing to keep GA from the air, it sounds like the general public might be the most likely ones. I have a lot of friends who have an irrational fear of "those little airplanes". There are a lot of car crashes every day, but if a single Cessna goes down, it makes national news. Which gets us right back to the FAA as a PR agency, but it also says that we pilots have a PR job of our own to do.
And getting back to the tech side of things, I've been wondering what it would take to make a homebuilt version of the Ercoupe. The plane's so darn cute it'd probably be pretty popular. At the same time, having some younger versions of the aircraft out there might blunt the push to retire older ones.
- Jeff ============================================================================== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm
