Calls For Quick Passage Of Long-Term Funding, Touches On BARR, GPS, Pilots' Bill Of Rights

By Tom Patton

FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt made his third appearance at AirVenture as head of the regulatory agency, and in many ways gave the same speech as he has the past two years.

Some of the issues have changed. The Administrator gave a brief overview of the funding situation that has caused a partial shutdown at the agency, a suspension of many airport projects, and the furlough of some 4,000 FAA employees. Babbitt called on Congress to "immediately pass a clean extension" of the continuing resolution which has kept the agency open since 2007, and to pass a long-term funding bill for the agency. "We are maintaining all of our safety efforts, all across the nation. All air traffic control efforts are completely manned. All of the inspections that we do, including the things we do here at AirVenture will be completely manned, and I'm proud to say we're going to maintain the safest aviation system in the world."

But Babbitt acknowledged that there are issues. "It's not business as usual at the FAA," he said. As an example, he said that the FAA would normally certify about 200 products per month, and that the lack of funding has caused that process to be slowed. He also indicated that work has been halted on dozens of AIP-funded construction projects at airports around the country, idling as many as 70 thousand construction workers.

But much of Babbitt's speech was boilerplate. He touched on the 8 percent reduction in the GA accident rate, though he said July had been a "particularly painful month" for accidents. He again brought up professionalism in the cockpit, which he has said in the past cannot be discussed often enough, and extolled the virtues of NextGen.

Many of the questions that might have been asked ... and asked much differently ... by people attending the forum were posed by EAA president Rod Hightower, who shared the stage with Babbitt. After a speech lasting about 20 minutes, Hightower spent about the next 30 minutes essentially interviewing the administrator, leaving only a short 15-20 minutes for questions from the audience.

Hightower did bring up many of the things which are important to the membership. On the topic of a drop-in replacement for leaded fuel, Babbitt said that being the only user of leaded fuel puts an unwelcome focus on the aviation industry. "The goal is a drop-in fuel," Babbitt said, "but that has proven to be a far more complicated process. It's not just as simple as saying 'we've come up with some new things'."  But the "good news" is that the EPA seems to be allowing some time for the formulation and certification of an unleaded replacement to 100LL avgas. He also said that such a replacement already exists ... "but I don't think anybody's looking forward to paying $20 a gallon for it."

On the BARR program, Babbitt said that, while there has been a great deal of discussion about privacy issues, only a few people have actually asked to be blocked from the tracking system. Babbitt said to his knowledge, no one who had asked to be excluded from tracking had been refused, and that as long as pilots or companies had a legitimate reason for being excluded from the system, their requests were likely to be granted. He did say that August 2nd was the deadline for application for exclusion.

Babbitt drew his biggest round of applause for stating that he is committed to protecting the GPS system against interference from LightSquared, the company proposing a nationwide wireless broadband service on frequencies close to the GPS spectrum. Babbitt said when the company first pitched the idea, the signals were coming from space at very low power. Then, he said, LightSquared changed the proposal to one for terrestrial transmitters at power levels orders of magnitude above the initial request. But he stated firmly that "we're going to protect the GPS signal."

In response to a question from Rod Hightower about the cost of ADS-B, Babbitt said that he thinks that the costs will drop dramatically when units are being mass produced, which he said is not the case now. And, he said, "if you're not flying in controlled airspace, you won't need one." Babbitt used the example of the home computer market, which has seen dramatic price reductions over the years. But the follow-up question which was not asked was how much those prices for ADS-B might fall, given that the market for the devices will likely never be the size of the market for home computers.

When the audience got its turn to ask a few questions, the subjects became more personal. Babbitt said he does not see anything on the horizon that would allow pilots flying planes heavier than a light-sport to do so without the benefit of a third-class medical certificate. He said that the FAA would "embrace" a Pilots Bill of Rights as proposed by U.S. Senator and pilot James Inhofe (R-OK), should it become the law of the land, but focused  entirely on the issue of the distribution of NOTAMS, and did not address some of the other important aspects of the proposed legislation, such as information sharing and suspension of flying privileges. And on the issue of user fees, the Administrator said that the Obama administration "has not supported user fees. Having said that, you've got a lot of people considering a lot of things going forward, they're trying not to raise taxes and so forth. But on the other hand, they're trying to solve a debt and deficit crisis. And so I think there's dialog that puts a lot of things on the table that wouldn't have been there before. We think that the way the system is structured today provides the revenue. Could you make tweaks within how we take it? Some adjustments within there, I think, could certainly be understood. Beyond that, that's going to be a congressional issue."

The speech was not as well attended as it was last year, which was down from the attendance the year before. The first year that Babbitt was administrator, he spoke to a standing-room crowd. This year, fully a third of the seats in Honda Pavilion were empty. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had been scheduled to appear with Administrator Babbitt, but cancelled his appearance at AirVenture Wednesday night. EAA spokesman Dick Knapinski informed the media at the morning briefing that Babbitt would be leaving Oshkosh almost immediately after the speech ... and he did.

FMI: www.faa.gov