Tradition

I was listening to an interview the other day with the man responsible for the lyrics in Fiddler On The Roof, which happens to be celebrating its 50 year anniversary.  He spoke about many interesting facets of the show, but I thought the most interesting few minutes were about the songs they didn't end up using, including the original opening number.

"It wasn't used because when Jerome Robbins became our director, we had many, many meetings before we went on to rehearsal. At each meeting he started with the same question: what is this show about? And he would say there's something that gives this show its power and we don't know what it is. And finally at one of those meetings one of us said hey, you know what this show is about? It's about changing of the way of life of a people in these Eastern European communities, these little towns, these shtetls, and Robbins got very excited about that. He said if that's the case, then what you have to write is a number about traditions, because we're going to see those traditions change. And that's so important in the show. Every scene or every other scene will be about whether a tradition changes or whether it remains the same. So instead of a song with the mother and the daughters getting ready for the Sabbath, he wanted us to write a song about tradition because he thought that's what the show is really about."

This weekend I had the chance to visit my fiancé's family cabin for Memorial Day weekend.  If you grew up somewhere other than the Northwoods (like I did), you may not understand the traditional significance of that holiday in that part of the world.  It's the unofficial start of summer, and it's easy to see just how widespread that celebration is when you're actually there.  Towns double in size, boat engines roar to life for the first time in months, and spirits are high.  These folks are creatures of habit in a strange but endearing way.

While I did grow up as a creature of the plains, I was extremely fortunate to have experienced aviation from an early age through the pilots God gave me for a father and grandfather.  I've heard it said that there are ultimately only old pilots and bold pilots, and becoming a third-generation old pilot is definitely a tradition I aim to honor.

My future grandmother in law sees us off

This weekend, our family traditions collided when I flew that rental Archer up to D25.  It's a marvelous little airport if you ever have the chance to visit.  I had the opportunity to take my future father in law and grandfather in law up for a little aerial tour of the area they've been frequenting for decades by car, and it was an experience I will absolutely never forget.

I think we as general aviators know Tevye's love for tradition as well as anyone.  Our planes are, on average, over 40 years old.  At our best, we rely on checklists and procedures to give our flights a firm foundation.  At our worst, we get stuck longing for the golden age of aviation to return without actually getting off our rears and doing what we can about it, and I think that's the side that concerns me.  If you haven't seen Fiddler, watched the above clip, or heard of the concept of foreshadowing, here's a little spoiler alert: in the end, Tevye's traditions can't save his village from the sweeping societal changes knocking at his door.  Its residents are eventually forced to adapt, but one can only imagine how much more difficult that integration was as a result of their longtime resistance.  On the one hand, they experienced a life very few others around the world were able to perceive.  On the other, that same world left them in the dust.

So what's it going to be?  Will we continue to lose 10,000 private pilots per year, dump lead into the atmosphere out of Metathesiophobia, or resist technological changes that will increase situational awareness for every pilot? Or will we honor our collective heritage by embracing the future with all its costs and benefits, and make of it what we can?

Let's choose the latter.  Let's honor our collective heritage of innovation and responsibility that has made aviation great. Let's fly.

Freedom and Responsibility

If you've never seen this video, do yourself a favor and watch it.  The actual interview starts at :40.



A very experienced GA pilot first shared this with me long before I had my own wings, and it's stuck with me.  I love Harrison as an actor, but I think I appreciate his words in this little clip more than any of his many films.  His story of becoming a pilot is probably different from most, but nevertheless relatable.  He exhibits the drive that makes any good pilot good: a desire to constantly improve and broaden his abilities.  He's lucky enough to fly for fun, but many would see him as even luckier for being able to incorporate GA into his non-aviation career.  In any case, he humbly recognizes that luck for what it is.  He is almost shockingly humble about his success, which makes you want to empathize with rather than mock his failings - you can't help but laugh along when you visualize his first solo (3:44).  His appreciation for small towns and small-town people also reflects one of the beautiful aspects of GA.  Even having grown up in a state with more cows than people, hopping into a little local airport feels to me like stepping back to a simpler era built on history and mutual trust.

What I really love about this video is when Harrison talks about why he flies.  Ask any pilot to do the same and freedom will be high the list (if they're honest); nobody gets into this because it's cheaper or safer than other modes of transportation.  But it is the mixture of freedom and responsibility (5:08) that fuels the adrenalin from takeoff to touchdown.  We pay dearly for the opportunity to launch into the sky, but that makes us value every second.  We take our lives (and those of our passengers) into our hands every time we line up on the numbers, but the gravity of that situation heightens our senses.  I think overcoming both of these hurdles is what makes us not only glad but proud to fly, and keeps us coming back for more.

Determination

What is it about the sky that makes us wonder?  Its blueness?  Its vastness?  Its usefulness or mystery or distance from home?  Whatever it is, we seem to keep our necks craned and our eyes wide.

I was walking around my grandparents' place the other morning, trying to identify the low-and-slow a few thousand feet above my head, when my eye caught something odd.

I'm no botanical expert, but I know one thing about that tree: it couldn't thrive in the space it was placed.  Maybe it had a biological issue within itself.  Maybe there was an environmental obstacle, or maybe some other plant grew in to block its place.  By whatever method, nature blocked the conventional route - but that tree wanted to go up, and it found a way.

I think this tree embodies the spirit of aviation both historically and today.  Humans found themselves shackled to the ground they walked on until they realized they could make vehicles that skidded or rolled.  Then they realized they could make their vehicles float and opened up a whole new world of discovery, but even once they discovered ways to penetrate the sky I believe they've never stopped looking up.  They probably never will.  At our roots we are firmly in the dust, and to dust we will return, but we will stretch upward and outward until that day comes.

Today, pilots find themselves simultaneously creating new ways to reach the heavens and dealing with new hurdles that try to keep them on the ground.  For some, it may be excessive regulation.  For others, personal health.  Maybe it's the financial burden, or the risk flying places on life itself.  But like that tree, we find a way.  We adapt, and grow, and find a way to be further into the air than we were yesterday.

Part 23: Reset

In November of 2013, both houses of the least productive Congress in recent memory unanimously passed a sweeping overhaul of an entrenched administrative agency.  If you're an American and that doesn't make you sit bolt upright, I'm not sure how else to grab your attention.  The Small Airplane Revitalization Act of 2013, as it was eventually named, directs the FAA to scrap Part 23 and replace it with performance-based regulations and consensus standards for new small plane design and technology.  This article will explain what Part 23 is, why it needed to change, and what we might expect going forward.

What could possibly have been important enough to cut across the most divisive party lines my generation has ever seen?  Well, according to the bill's findings, we lost 10,000 active private pilots per year between 2003 and 2013, at least partly due to a lack of new, small, and cost-effective airplanes.  Small planes constitute nearly 90% of all certified aircraft, but the average small airplane in the United States is now 40 years old because "the regulatory barriers to bringing new designs to the market are resulting in a lack of innovation and investment in small airplane design." Believe it or not, airplanes haven't always been prohibitively expensive for the average consumer.  In 1946, brand new light personal aircraft could be purchased at your favorite department store for under $2,500 - about $30,000 in today's dollars.  In other words, general aviation is (not slowly) dying because excessive and unwieldy regulation has impeded its ability to grow.  The situation was bad enough to light a fire under even the most ensconced of butts, but pilots everywhere should be excited about this law and what it says about the direction of general aviation.

Part 23 contains the FAA's airworthiness standards for normal, utility, acrobatic, and commuter airplanes - essentially anything smaller than a transporter but bigger than a recreational or light-sport aircraft (LSA).  We won't worry about transporters here, but LSAs will actually play a pretty big role.
As you can see in the FAA's own diagram at right, the rule making process under Part 23 is old, clunky, and inefficient.  It replaced US Civil Air Regulations Part 3 in 1965 and has been amended 62 times.  It is really an amalgamation of 1) the written regulations, 2) a system of overlapping Advisory Circulars (ACs), and 3) industry standards from SAE, RTCA, and others.  Together, these define acceptable means of compliance (MOCs) with the Part 23 requirements: they tell manufacturers and mechanics what the minimums are, but also how to meet them.  Planes must meet those requirements to earn a type certification under Part 21, which is its own costly and tedious process.

Most people know that in its 2004 Final Rule, the FAA decided to allow certain pilots to fly LSAs using a "driver's license medical" rather than a third-class medical.  This was a big deal in that it allowed many highly capable but medically disqualified pilots to return to the air, and I'll be doing another article soon detailing Congress's latest attempt to expand that privilege.  What fewer people seem to know is that the FAA also completely revamped its airworthiness requirements for this new class of aircraft.  It took airworthiness standards for LSAs out of the exclusive control of the FAA and instead put the agency on an ASTM committee (F37) made up of regulatory bodies, manufacturers, and other stakeholders that reached what came to be known as consensus standards.  These standards focused on the complexity and capability of planes, rather than weight and engine type.  That might seem a little less sexy than the medical issue, but it was hugely effective in bringing down the exorbitant cost of type certifications for LSAs: estimates for LSA certification run something like $125k-250k while estimates for a Part 21 type certificate range from $25 million to $75 million for a normal four-place aircraft.  The rule making process is also much quicker and, at least according to FAA administrator Randy Babbitt, its safety record has met or exceeded the FAA's expectations.  In the end, the proof is in the pudding: new LSAs have been certified at a rate of more than one per month for the ten years since the Final Rule went into effect.

The findings in the Revitalization Act aren't news to the FAA: many of them are copied from or mirrored by the FAA's own 2009 Study of Part 23's effectiveness.  The FAA has known for awhile that its policies were stifling innovation and that it could do something about it, but they sat on their hands for a little too long.  What the Revitalization Act really does is give the FAA a deadline of December 15, 2015 to issue a final rule accomplishing a number of specific objectives it was already considering:

1. Create a new regulatory regime for small airplanes to lighten the regulatory burdens on the FAA and the aviation industry.
2. Establish broad, outcome-driven safety objectives to spur innovation and technology adoption.
3. Replace the airplane weight and engine-type requirements in Part 23 with performance-based regulations.  This is important because the old "bigger = more complex" paradigm no longer accurately reflects the aircraft in production and their safety risks and benefits.
4. Adopt and use consensus standards to clarify how the safety objectives of Part 23 may be met using specific designs and technologies.  This will replace the overlapping ACs and other standards that currently lay out the acceptable MOCs.

This emphasis on outcome-driven safety objectives, consensus standards, and performance-based regulations, along with a trimming down of the Part 21 process, has been projected by the FAA (p. ix) to achieve certification with twice the safety in half the cost.  You can track the progress of the ASTM Committee revamping Part 23 (F44) on their website.

In short, pilots and the aircraft industry can expect a faster, cheaper, and safer certification process in which they actually have a say about a year and a half from now.  If that doesn't get your gears turning, you'd better see a doctor: you've got even less of a pulse than Congress.

Getting Off the Ground

Hello and welcome to TFL.  This isn't a law firm and I'm not a lawyer (yet).  This is just my way of funneling my passion for general aviation through my small but growing ability as a law student to hopefully come up with something useful for you.  Thanks for reading and welcome aboard!