Report From Washington

The New Part 145: With the new Part 145 in effect, the FAA has made a revision to five chapters of its Handbook Bulletin for Airworthiness that instructs inspectors in the field how they are now to interpret Part 145 in their dealings with affected repair stations. This new revision says that its purpose is to "provide guidance to airworthiness aviation safety inspectors who have oversight and surveillance responsibility for FAA-certificated repair stations" operating under Part 145. In other words, FAA headquarters is telling its inspectors how to enforce these new regulations, and that in itself is a blessing because so often in the past there was no central guidance or direction. The result was that that rules were interpreted differently around the country. This new material discusses many matters of vital importance to repair station operators, such as changes in maintenance functions, line maintenance authorization, and satellite repair stations. Therefore it is a critical source for any repair station in dealing with inspectors in the future. The whole 76-page document can be viewed on the FAA web site for its Handbook Bulletin for Airworthiness at http://www.faa.gov/avr/afs/hbaw/hbawl.htm. The reference is HBAW 03-04A. Must reading.

Goglia's Replacement: President Bush has nominated Deborah Hersman to replace John Goglia as one of the five members on the National Transportation Safety Board, a move met with dismay by many in the aviation industry. (See AM, April 2004, page 10.) Hersman, 33, is a congressional aide who is presently working as a staff member on the Senate Commerce Committee, but she lacks professional aviation credentials, despite the fact that over the years some 80 percent of the incidents reviewed by the board involve aircraft. She is reported to be quite intelligent and extremely competent in congressional activities on Capitol Hill and she has worked there on transportation matters in the past, mainly Amtrak, and also some aviation issues such as security and hazardous materials, but these were policy issues and not technical aircraft operations. IAM, the union that represents mechanics at many airlines, has opposed her nomination on the basis of lack of aviation background. But the White House has been defensive about this nomination, saying that they nominate "well qualified individuals who have the expertise to get the job done well." This is a purely political appointment, and the Hersman nomination has already been unanimously approved by the Commerce Committee and was referred to the full Senate where it is expected to pass with equal ease.

The NTSB investigates hundreds of aviation accidents each year, but with the departure of Goglia there remains on the board only one person with practical experience in aviation safety matters, Richard Healing, a former director of safety for the Department of the Navy where he focused on aircraft safety. Even more critically, Goglia, as the only A&P to ever serve on the board, brought to the board a unique insight to the importance of maintenance in maintaining aircraft safety, a perspective that was lacking prior to his appointment in 1995 and will sadly be lacking again in the foreseeable future.

Fuel Tank Retrofits: For the past few years the FAA has been studying the question of fuel tank explosions in large commercial jets, and a number of fuel tank retrofits have been considered, all of which seemed to be forbiddingly expensive. Now FAA researchers have developed what they claim is a workable retrofit that they say solves the technical and economic problems. The FAA therefore is seriously considering a rule change that would require the installation of a system for these large jets, which essentially replaces oxygen in fuel tanks with an inert gas like nitrogen. This system weighs no more than 200 pounds and requires no moving parts, and without oxygen these tanks should not explode. FAA administrator Marion Blakey said that "once these planes are equipped with inerting technology we can close the door on fuel tank explosions." The cost of each retrofit is estimated to be about $140,000 to $200,000, depending on the jet, and this proposal by FAA is far superior to earlier suggested retrofits which were considered as too heavy, too space consuming, and too expensive to be practicable. "I think it would be too irresponsible," Blakey said, "not to move forward with breakthroughs such as this." The plan is for new designs to have inerting systems in place before they are certificated while retrofits for older commercial jets will be phased in over a seven-year period. Some 3,800 aircraft currently flying would be affected, but the retrofits would begin with those that the FAA considers most vulnerable to fuel tank explosions, which it says are the Boeing 737 and 747 and the Airbus 320. The affected numbers would be 1,453 737s, 729 A320s, and 170 Boeing 747s. Some industry analysts are not convinced that this one retrofit would solve all the potential problems of the various aircraft designs, but nevertheless the FAA seems determined to forge ahead with it and looks forward to a final rule change sometime in 2005.

GA and the PFC: AOPA president Phil Boyer has taken sharp issue with Northwest Airlines for an editorial it published in its inflight magazine, which claims that airline passengers are subsidizing general aviation by the taxes paid on airline tickets, notably the passenger facility charges (PFC). The editorial signed by Northwest CEO Richard Anderson tells his passengers that general aviation aircraft usually fly at airports used by the airlines but they do not pay the PFC, which is a tax levied for airport development and maintenance. Boyer replied that the editorial contains "seriously flawed statements." Obviously, Boyer said, general aviation does not collect the PFC because it is an airline passenger tax and general aviation does not fly airline passengers, but general aviation does pay a variety of other taxes, including fuel flowage fees, tax on rental space, and landing fees. Furthermore, facilities that the airlines use are basically constructed and maintained for the airlines. There are 18,000 landing facilities in the U.S. air transportation system but only a small fraction of those are used by the airlines. At those, airlines pay the PFC, which is for all the things the airlines need: the terminals, the parking areas, the restaurants, the passenger ticket and boarding areas, the ramps, and the long runways capable of bearing the weight of a 500,000-pound aircraft. These are airline costs. Finally, Boyer made the point that general aviation has been trying rather unsuccessfully to communicate to the American public for many years—general aviation is not an elite system but rather is an important part of the gross national product because it contributes more than $100 billion each year in economic benefits to the U.S. economy in the form of jobs, business profits, and economic growth.