Editor in Chief Thomas B. Haines has been reporting on the general aviation industry for nearly two decades.
I'll forgive you if you did not notice the major victory that general aviation pilots won a few weeks ago when the FAA released the latest edition of its five-year strategic plan. Called "Flight Plan 2005-2009," the document sets FAA strategy and outlines initiatives in support of that strategy. On page 27 of the 44-page document under the strategy of "Modify separation standards and procedures to allow more efficient use of congested airspace" is the initiative "Develop a strategy to streamline and improve the Notice to Airmen process."
That 12-word initiative may not sound like much, but it is the culmination of years of lobbying by many in the aviation industry — from AOPA and the AOPA Air Safety Foundation to major universities and manufacturers. The brokenness of the notam system became most obvious after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Since then the FAA has routinely issued large temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) whenever the president and vice president are traveling. TFRs have also cropped up over nuclear power plants, sports stadiums, even certain theme parks where a well-known mouse resides.
Most baffling were the TFRs over the nuclear power plants. The FAA, obviously under pressure from the Department of Energy in the days after the attacks, issued the TFRs ordering pilots to stay away from nuclear power plants. However, DOE refused to tell pilots where the plants were located "for security reasons." So the word was, Don't fly there, but we can't tell you where "there" is. Never mind that up until September 10, 2001, the DOE Web site had listed locations of all of the power plants. AOPA, working with Jeppesen cartographers and software developers, within about 24 hours had created an online chart that showed the power-plant TFR locations. Since then the nuclear-power-plant TFRs have been made smaller and less onerous, but good luck sorting out the information from your next online route briefing.
Consider a flight from Vero Beach, Florida, to North Palm Beach County General Aviation Airport 50 miles down the coast — about a 20-minute flight in my Beech Bonanza. Request an online route briefing and you'll get 17 pages of information; all but four are notam-related, mostly TFRs. Make it a "plain language" briefing that the average mortal can understand and the page count jumps to 33. That's about a page of text for every 1.5 miles of flight. Flight service station briefers can help distill the information, but they are not immune to missing what may be an important piece of information somewhere along your flight.
And make no mistake about it, missing some piece of information may lead to disaster. In late November 2004, a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter crashed in fog near Fort Hood, Texas, after it struck a guy wire supporting a television transmission tower. All seven aboard were killed. The light on the tower had been notamed out of service a couple of weeks earlier. It is unclear at this time whether the helicopter pilots knew about the outage or whether it was buried in their preflight briefing. We in the aviation media don't like to speculate on the causes of aircraft accidents until the NTSB has issued its final report because preliminary speculation is almost always wrong. However, the general media is already suggesting that the outage or the pilots' potential lack of knowledge about the outage may have contributed to the crash.
AOPA is aware of many situations where pilots accidentally penetrated flight-restricted areas because of a lack of digestible information — often because they missed the notam reporting the TFR in a sea of other information.
Apparently feeling the need for some official document stating that the problem exists, the FAA commissioned a $75,000 study with the University of Central Florida. The university staff reported back in July 2004 with the news that in one crash "pilots had trouble extracting and remembering information about the runway closure included in a notice they had received before taking off."
The study acknowledged that notams are written in capital letters with abbreviations that often are confusing and that pilots often have trouble figuring out which notams pertain to their route of flight. The university staff recommended that "notices should be written in 'plain and simple' language instead of abbreviations that can confuse even experienced pilots." They also said the notices should be "better organized so pilots can sort the data and easily find important information pertaining to their flights."
Now, I know what you're thinking: How nice that $75,000 would have looked in your panel after you spent 30 minutes on the ramp asking six GA pilots about notams and then came to the same conclusion the researchers did. But, hey, bureaucracy has its own pace and price so let's not get in the way of progress, slow as it may be. In the end, the FAA heard the calling and finally, with some final last-minute encouragement in a letter from AOPA, put those 12 words in the five-year plan. As AOPA President Phil Boyer noted after the plan came out, "The 'Flight Plan' now recognizes that the notice to airmen system has got to be streamlined, modernized, and improved."
You can bet that AOPA and ASF will be there to offer advice and counsel on how the new notam system gets built. Let's hope it doesn't take the full five years.
No shortage of opinions
Perhaps in your conversations with fellow birdpersons you have noticed that pilots seldom lack opinions about most anything — politics, sports, high wing/low wing, composite versus aluminum — whatever the subject, a flying friend will undoubtedly regale you with his or her opinion. Sometimes you may even have to solicit that opinion.
Sit at this desk very long, answer this e-mail and telephone, and you'll hear all sorts of opinions. Currently a longtime member is upset with us because in the December 2004 "Letters" section we published another member's opinion (see " Much More Than a Bad Day") that the crash of Sen. Paul Wellstone may have been part of a conspiracy to influence the majority rule in the U.S. Senate. The longtime member is of the opinion that we shouldn't publish such stuff. In our opinion, the conspiracy letter was just intriguing enough — and amusing enough — to warrant a few inches of space. The "Letters" section, after all, is the place where members can express their opinions — even if they are sometimes contrary to popular thought. Please hold your letters on the conspiracy designed to make it look like we actually landed on the moon. That one has run its course.
In our day-to-day flying, we rely on opinions a lot more than you might think. The "rules" that we fly by are often someone else's opinion of what the regulations actually mean. For example, aviation attorneys spend countless hours studying FAA and NTSB opinions to garner information on how an enforcement action might play out.
Another member recently pointed out that an FAA interpretation — an opinion — of instrument currency regulations suggests that pilots can only log instrument approaches flown to the decision altitude or minimum descent altitude. Gone are the days when you could intercept the localizer outside the final approach fix while still in instrument conditions and then break out miles from the airport and still log the approach. Now it has to be flown in instrument meteorological conditions or under the hood to minimums before you can log the approach.
I, several CFIs I know, and AOPA's Pilot Information Center staff had been operating under an interpretation of FAR 61.31 that said if you flew any pressurized airplane you must have a high-altitude logbook endorsement unless you had logged time in such an airplane prior to April 15, 1991. When I wrote that in this column in the June 2004 issue, a flight instructor shared his opinion that you needed the endorsement only if your pressurized airplane was certificated to fly above 25,000 feet. We went back to the FAA and just recently received an interpretation that the member is correct.
Have an opinion? It may be more correct and more relevant than you think, which is what our "Letters" section is all about. We're anxious to hear your opinion.
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