Source: https://www.aviationairportdevelopmentlaw.com/tags/paul-j-fraidenburgh/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 08:04:10+00:00

Document:
In a March 27, 2019 appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Aviation and Space, Daniel K. Elwell, Acting Administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) sought to clarify the FAA’s role in the certification of the safety of aircraft systems. In doing so, he emphasized that the principal responsibility for safety lies with the aircraft manufacturers, with FAA performing merely a review function to determine “if the applicant [for certification] has shown that the overall design meets the safety standards. We do that by reviewing data and by conducting risk based evaluations of the applicant’s work,” Statement of Administrator, before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Subcommittee on Aviation and Space on the State of Airline Safety: Federal Oversight of Commercial Aviation, March 27, 2019 (“Statement”). The problem with this explanation may not be the adopted approach, but the lapses in FAA’s realization of its part of the bargain.
Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document.
Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward.
Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed.
Nevertheless, the Acting Administrator goes on to divest FAA of responsibility.
In recent months, since the tragic crashes of two Boeing 737-Max aircraft in disparate areas of the globe, both the public and the press have expressed surprise at the finding that the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) was delegating to the aircraft manufacturing industry the principal responsibility for formal certification of aircraft safety. They shouldn’t have been so surprised.
The press consistently blames “agency capture,” the process by which federal agencies purportedly develop cooperative, and even symbiotic, relationships with the industries they are tasked with regulating. In fact, in this instance, it was the United States Congress, in Section 312 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (“FMRA”), that opened the door to the now questioned delegation of authority over aircraft safety.
Within hours after FAA’s grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft, pilots and aviation experts began to weigh in on the rationale. The first in the chorus was the Acting Administrator, Daniel Elwell, who opined that, in the face of the immediate action to ground the aircraft taken by European aviation authorities, as well as the increasing public outcry, the FAA had discovered “new evidence” from the site of the recent deadly airline crash in Ethiopia that justified defiance of the aeronautical industry urging a more measured approach.
Specifically, the Acting Administrator, in an interview with CNBC, stated that information made available since March 13 verified that the Ethiopian airline’s flight track “was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight” that had crashed in Indonesia in October 2018 “to warrant the grounding of the airplanes so that we could get more information from the black boxes and determine if there is a link between the two, and, if there is, to find a fix to that link.” Ultimately, the agency concluded “the full track of the Ethiopian flight was very close to Lion Air,” and, thus, justified the grounding. The remaining question of what potentially caused the similar fatal incidence was, however, left up to other aviation experts.
As the popularity of unmanned aircraft systems (“UAS” or “drones”) increases, expanding to such hybrid uses as local air taxi services, the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) has been faced with pressure to loosen existing restrictions on drone operation. The FAA’s initial regulation, 14 C.F.R. Part 107, in essence, gave with one hand while taking away with the other, by prohibiting drone operations under a variety of different circumstances, including a prohibition on operation over people, 14 C.F.R. § 107.39, prohibition on night operations, 14 C.F.R. 107.29, and prohibition on flights over moving vehicles, 14 C.F.R. § 107.25, while providing, at the same time, a process for obtaining waivers of those prohibitions, 14 C.F.R. § 107.200. In its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”), RIN 2120-AK85, FAA now proposes to allow operations over people and at night without the need for waivers, if the UAS meet certain preliminary standards, and the remote pilot in command conducts the activity pursuant to the proposed rule.
The FAA’s position is not new, but arises directly from the Federal Aviation Act (“FAA Act”), 49 U.S.C. §§ 40103(a)(1) [“The United States government has exclusive sovereignty over the airspace of the United States”], and 49 U.S.C. § 47524(c)(1)(A)-(E), enacted as the Airport Noise and Capacity Act of 1990, which prohibits local limitations on Stage 3 aircraft operations in the absence of approval by the Secretary of Transportation and all aircraft operators at the relevant airport.
This seemingly spontaneous reiteration of Congress’ and the agency’s long held positions comes not without provocation.
On July 6, 2018, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (“D.C. Circuit”) conclusively rejected a comprehensive challenge to the authority of the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) to promulgate regulations governing that subset of unmanned aircraft systems (“UAS”) defined in the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, Pub. L. 112-95 (codified at 49 U.S.C. § 40101, note) (“FMRA”), as “model” aircraft, i.e., those “flown for hobby or recreational purposes.” FMRA, § 336(c)(3).
In Taylor v. FAA, D.C. Cir. No. 16-1302, the court upheld FAA regulations implementing FMRA § 336, Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, 81 Fed.Reg. 42064 (June 28, 2016), which effectively subjects small UAS (up to 55 pounds, FMRA, § 336(c)(3)), to similar, if not identical, safety standards to those applicable to commercial UAS.
Updated April 30, 2018 – In a surprising turnaround of its usual tilt toward the interests of the aviation industry, the United States House of Representatives passed, on April 27, 2018, its version of the six year budget reauthorization for the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”), the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 (“Reauthorization Act”), a number of provisions that appear to address the long smoldering, and vociferously expressed, concerns of the flying public with, among other things, the unannounced “bumping” of passengers with reservations and paid tickets to make way for airline employees; airline employees’ difficulty in dealing with passengers in such stressful situations; the size and orientation of aircraft seats that have been radically shrinking in order to make room for more passengers; and even the absence of ground transportation accessing the airport itself.

References: § 107
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