Four-Year FAA Funding Bill Accelerates NextGen

For about five years, the FAA has limped along with 23 short-term funding appropriations from Congress, but on Tuesday, congressional leaders said they have reached agreement on a four-year, $63 billion funding bill. The legislation has not yet been released, but according to USA Today, the funding will accelerate the creation of the NextGen air traffic control system. A new post will be created -- the Chief NextGen Officer -- to oversee the effort, and a schedule for progress will be set. The bill also assures funding subsidies for rural airports at $190 million a year. New labor rules will make it harder for airline employees to unionize, requiring half the workers in a bargaining unit to petition for a vote to certify a union, an increase from the current 35 percent.

NASA App Uses ATC To Teach Math

A new free app from NASA is designed to help kids understand math by solving simulated ATC problems, but developers hope it will also inspire them to pursue a career in aeronautics. "Using an interactive game to spark their interest, while at the same time teaching them fundamental math concepts … is a perfect way to help cultivate the next generation of engineers and technologists," said Leland Melvin, NASA's associate administrator for education. The "Sector 33" app, which can be downloaded free from Apple's app store, allows the player to work a sector of airspace spanning Nevada and California, adjusting each airplane's path and speed to move as fast as possible while maintaining separation and avoiding thunderstorms.

AVmail: January 30, 2012

Letter of the Week: The Case for Fuel TaxesRegarding aviation user fees: I assert that the "user" of the ATC system is not the airline or airplane, but the person traveling. The person traveling needs ATC to get him or her safely to his or her destination. If you want to charge per flight, you should charge per passenger on that flight. In that case, an airliner carrying 200 passengers should pay more than a corporate jet carrying four passengers. In fact, it should pay about fifty times more.In addition, you should charge more for longer flights than for shorter flights. A flight from New York to Los Angeles spends more time in ATC than a flight from New York to Chicago.Now, in order to collect this fee, a whole new bureaucracy will have to be developed. Who is going to track the fifty million individual flights each year? How is the money paid? Who will audit all of this? How do the many corporate jets figure into all of this? And what about air freight?Let's look for a cheaper way to fund ATC that is still equitable.It turns out that, when measured by passenger-mile, most airplanes get about the same mileage, about 60 passenger-miles per gallon. Now, there is a range, but it's not six passenger-miles per gallon, and it's not six hundred passenger-miles per gallon, either — and it tracks reasonably close for a 737 or a Citation.Let's take a commercial flight of 1,000 miles with 200 passengers. That's about 200,000 passenger-miles. At sixty passenger miles per gallon, that's about 3,000 gallons of fuel. If you want to recover $100 from this flight, that's about three cents per gallon.At three dollars per gallon fuel cost, that's about one percent. Sure, people will complain. But it will be a whole lot cheaper with much less hassle than collecting this fee separately.Like everyone else, I don't like paying taxes, but I also believe that there are government services that need to be paid for, and they need to be paid for, directly or indirectly, by the people who benefit from the service. In this case, given a choice of fuel tax or [a] separately calculated and charged fee, I go with the tax.Reid SayreClick through to read the rest of this week's letters.

Jooyan Joins Flexjet

FlexjetGino Jooyan is the new southwest coast fractional sales director for Flexjet. He's been in the business for 10 years and was most recently V.P. of business development for an aircraft management company.

FAA Delays UAS Rulemaking

The FAA has further delayed publishing rulemaking on access by unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to the National Airspace System (NAS). The agency announced Monday that a proposed rule that was supposed to be ready by the end of January will instead be published "this spring." The FAA did not say why the rule was delayed. This rule will deal with drones that weigh less than 55 pounds and the delay will affect businesses that have already found numerous uses for the increasingly sophisticated and remarkably affordable devices.

Honda Looking For A Quarter Of The Market

After working on its foray into aviation for 25 years, Honda can be expected to be looking for a return on its patient investment, but comments made by the head of the company's aviation division to Reuters turned some heads on Tuesday. Michimasa Fujino likened the almost-certified HondaJet to the introduction of the Honda Civic and said the company was going after 25 percent of the worldwide light jet market. "I'm very optimistic about our prospects," Fujino said. "We're doing with HondaJet what the Civic did to American cars from the 1960s. Our competitors are still producing with technology from the 1990s."

FAA Medical System To Go Paperless

All applications for medical and student pilot certificates will be filed electronically instead of on paper by Oct. 1, the FAA said last week. In the January issue of the FAA Medical Bulletin (PDF), Federal Air Surgeon Dr. Fred Tilton said the paper system "allows for too many errors, leads to storage problems, and creates security risks." It also costs the FAA $150,000 every year to print, store, distribute, and mail Form 8500-8. The electronic MedXPress system will eliminate those problems and expenses, and will make it possible to offer new services -- for example, Tilton said, pilots and AMEs will be able to track the status of applications online. EAA and AOPA raised concerns about the change.

FAA Medical System To Go Paperless

All applications for medical and student pilot certificates will be filed electronically instead of on paper by Oct. 1, the FAA said last week. In the January issue of the FAA Medical Bulletin (PDF), Federal Air Surgeon Dr. Fred Tilton said the paper system "allows for too many errors, leads to storage problems, and creates security risks." It also costs the FAA $150,000 every year to print, store, distribute, and mail Form 8500-8. The electronic MedXPress system will eliminate those problems and expenses, and will make it possible to offer new services -- for example, Tilton said, pilots and AMEs will be able to track the status of applications online. EAA and AOPA raised concerns about the change.

NASA App Uses ATC To Teach Math

A new free app from NASA is designed to help kids understand math by solving simulated ATC problems, but developers hope it will also inspire them to pursue a career in aeronautics. "Using an interactive game to spark their interest, while at the same time teaching them fundamental math concepts … is a perfect way to help cultivate the next generation of engineers and technologists," said Leland Melvin, NASA's associate administrator for education. The "Sector 33" app, which can be downloaded free from Apple's app store, allows the player to work a sector of airspace spanning Nevada and California, adjusting each airplane's path and speed to move as fast as possible while maintaining separation and avoiding thunderstorms.

Pilot Charged With Manslaughter In Crash

A New Hampshire pilot faces manslaughter charges for a crash in January 2011 that killed his 35-year-old daughter. Steven Fay, 57, of Hillsborough, N.H., will be arraigned Thursday on one count of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the crash of a Cessna 310F twin, which killed Jessica Malin. Fay is accused of "unintentionally and unlawfully" causing Malin's death by means of "wanton or reckless conduct." According to the NTSB's factual report, Fay held a private pilot certificate for ASEL only, with no multiengine rating, although he had logged about 50 hours of multi instruction time. The airplane hit trees on final approach as the pilot was attempting a visual touch-and-go landing, about 90 minutes after sunset, at a small airport in Orange, Mass.