Avionics News October 2015 - 19

"Any change, even a change for the
better, is always accompanied by
drawbacks and discomforts."
- Arnold Bennett, English novelist

o you hear the clock ticking? Do you hear the
rustle of pages flying off the calendar? More
importantly, do clients and customers hear the

ics industry estimates pegged the installation rate needed to hit
full fleet compliance at more than 150 per workday between
2015 and the end of 2019.
But some of the issues holding back progress seem in the process of being resolved
- at least on the fronts of equipment costs,
With installation needs
approvals and availability.
rising and the FAA
On the human side, nearly every associaadministrator adamant
tion with a toe in these waters expects the
that there will be no
deadline to arrive with a significant number
movement on
of aircraft yet to comply.
the deadline,
To procrastinate is human; to miss the
deadline is to get locked out of airspace
ANYTHING THAT
where pilots today need at least Mode C
MOVES MORE PEOPLE
with its altitude squawk - all Class A, most
TO EQUIP CAN'T BE A
Class B, and certain Class C, D and E.
BAD THING.
Those pieces of airspace require ADS-B Out
starting just after the stroke of midnight on
Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2020.

clock ticking?
As of Oct. 1, less than 51 months
remain before the Federal Aviation Administration's deadline for
complying with a mandate requiring
most aircraft to equip with Automatic
Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast
Out, or ADS-B Out.
It's been a slow start to say the
least.
On May 27, 2010, the FAA published its final rule from a 2008 notice
of proposed rulemaking establishing
the mandate requiring ADS-B Out.
Today, more than five years in with
stilted progress, promises a logjam
of operators seeking installation, and
that logjam seems destined to worsen.
But signs and sounds at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in July
2015 seemed to show activity picking up and attitudes swinging
on what's been one of the most cussed, discussed and misunderstood rules since the FAA first started requiring transponders
with altitude encoding.
Aircraft operators, it seems, finally show signs of the message
sinking in - and it's happening among owners and operators of
both general aviation and commercial aircraft.
The change doesn't appear sufficient to eliminate a changerate already deemed impossible; as of the beginning of the year,
fewer than 10,000 aircraft complied out of a general aviation
fleet numbering nearly 210,000. At about the same time, avion-

Delay of game: The reasons are shrinking
Oh, the drawbacks and discomforts remain; critics still note
the rule does more for the FAA than for the operators. For some
operators, that is - operators already invested in collision-avoidance and in-cockpit weather hardware.
Holding to that position essentially dismisses as meaningless
the indirect benefits to operators so equipped - and the huge
benefit of ADS-B In to the thousands of operators not equipped
with in-cockpit weather receivers and collision-avoidance
hardware.
The direct benefit to even those already equipped with basic
Continued on following page
avionics news

october

2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Avionics News October 2015