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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

Onerous certification incentivizes companies to invent in other countries.

The FAA has become increasing bureaucratic and in many cases it is causing safety issues. Take the recent case where they deemed it illegal to do a low-pass over a private airstrip to assess safety prior to landing.

I'd like to see the FAA do a pass over existing and new regulations to see if they can generalize any of the rules. IE if the concern for safety is due to momentum/potential energy, codify that rather than separate limitations on weight and speed.

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>Take the recent case where they deemed it illegal to do a low-pass over a private airstrip to assess safety prior to landing.

I am a big fan of Trent Palmer as well, so I tend to take his side of the story as more likely. However I believe the FAA is arguing that he never intended to land and was just planning to buzz his friend's house. I wasn't there so I don't know what really happened. However I agree, claiming that his landing was "not necessary" so the pre-landing pass was not protected seems very short-sighted.

Here's Trent's video on this if you want to hear his side for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpFDRoStcd4

I'm on Trent's side here as well, but I will also say that I've seen many inspection passes of paved runways. These are often in conjunction with an airport event. (I guess maybe there's an increased risk of a fouled runway during such events and, you know, you can never be too careful...)

I watch a lot of ATC videos on YouTube and these low passes happen a lot in emergency situations. The two scenarios I've seen are:

1) Pilot thinks there may be damage/malfunction and does a low pass so that the Tower/Ground Ops staff can have a look. This was evident in a recent one I saw where the pilot had a nose gear fault. It took two passes, but they were able to confirm that the nose gear was NOT down and were still able to have a successful landing.

2) Student pilot either has mechanical issue or in-plane pilot becomes incapacitated. Tower/remote instructor tells student to do multiple low, slow passes at increasingly lower altitudes and speeds to get used to taking the proper heading and control inputs until the final pass is so low/slow that the landing essentially happens naturally.

I'd be flabbergasted if the FAA bans this type of thing, in both of these cases I personally saw (and I'm sure many others), this procedure saved lives. Why would they ban this?

I think the FAA is trying to root out and punish buzz jobs. I can't imagine they'd take enforcement action on anyone who had an emergency (which both #1 and #2 would fall into).

For non-emergencies, I love watching and hearing a good low pass, but these impromptu displays could get annoying for airport neighbors and they have killed people when someone gets a little too sporty in their display. If the airport Saturday morning breakfast low passes all went away, I'd be slightly sad but it's probably for the best.

Trent's case is an interesting one. I don't know what his actual intent was, but unless it was clearly a show-off-only low pass, I think the FAA should let it go.

The noise complaints are pretty ridiculous. There are no new airports so people knew what they were getting into when purchasing the property, you see the same thing around bars in the city that have been open for 50+ years. This is another case where the FAA has favored politics over safety, many noise abatement procedures involve delaying crosswind turns or other maneuvers that decrease the safety of the pattern. Just like houses have flood zones as required disclosures, maybe we should have airport zone houses where noise is expected.

If low-passes are a significant safety risk, then the FAA should prove as such and write a clear rule specific to it, IE a maximum speed over the runway. All kinds of air safety seminars + CFIs are trying to teach go-around as a normal maneuver that should be practiced regularly and then the FAA basically says a go-around could cost you your license.

I agree it’s entirely out of bounds to complain about noise from operationally necessary aircraft operations (operationally needed for flight, not that the operational need for the flight is subject to review).

I’m a lot more sympathetic to noise complaints against 2700 RPM (prop tips nearly the speed of sound), high-power, low passes that have no operational need.

As far as I understand it, this is less about the amount of energy and more to do with the type of pilot certificate one would need to have.

The majority of pilots are initially rated for the Airplane category with Airplane, Single Engine, Land as the most common class. Powered lift is a completely different category, and so pilots rated for the Airplane category would have to qualify separately, including a certain minimum number of hours with a flight instructor, a certain number of solo hours, cross-country flight distance and a check ride.

This would significantly raise the bar to fly these aircraft. I also don't even know for these eVTOLs whether it'd be credible to do e.g. the cross country flight which requires at least 150 nautical miles of travel, including three full-stop landings, due to the battery lifetime.

Establishing a different pilot certification category would seem reasonable. Powered lift flight involves a transition from vertical to horizontal and back, and that isn't covered in regular pilot training.

A helicopter license only requires a 50 mile cross country flight so I expect the FAA would set a requirement closer to that for powered lift.

Powered lift is already a category: the aeronautical experience requirements are here https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/61.109#e

It seems obvious that it should require a separate checkride to fly a VTOL aircraft if you have only airplane category ratings. The training for an add-on certificate is not that intensive nor expensive and I think is well-justified.

> Onerous certification incentivizes companies to invent in other countries.

I'm sure there are lots of countries around the world that would bend their aviation rules to whatever whim a company wanted. I'm assuming they don't take advantage of that because of the lack of infrastructure, talent, funding, and a viable commercial market.

No country has the same capital floating around. It's much harder to get funding in Europe. IDK about Asia, but it doesn't look nearly as easy neither.

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