 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Meet the FAA Forum. Your host today will be Doug Murphy, who is the regional administrator for the southern region here in Florida. So please welcome FAA and Doug Murphy. Good afternoon, and welcome to the Meet the FAA Forum at Sun and Fun. It's great for me to be here because this is my first time participating in Sun and Fun. Those of you who know, knew for many years, Carolyn Blum, our regional administrator who retired, the last few days people have said, well, oh, you're the one who replaced Carolyn Blum. And I think Carolyn may be with us today, but you cannot replace Carolyn Blum. So I'm the individual that followed Carolyn Blum as a regional administrator in the southern region. Lakeland certainly is a great place to be. It was interesting for me to learn that in 2006 that Money Magazine identified Lakeland, Florida as one of the best places to live in the U.S., and I would submit to you that this week, Lakeland, Florida and this airport is one of the best places in the world for those of us that like aviation. We've got a great group today. Unfortunately, the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, was not able to join us, but we've got a great group of participants from our FAA headquarters. We are going to spend a little bit of time talking to you about what's going on in FAA, but we're not here to basically tell you all what we think is the good news. We want to hear from you. We want to hear your thoughts, your concerns, and maintain a dialogue. So we'll spend a few minutes talking about what's going on in FAA, and then we'll open it up to questions and answers. When we get to the question and answer point, I will ask you, because we do have a short period of time with about an hour to basically confine your comments to a question as opposed to maybe some lengthy remarks. If you have some interest after the conclusion of this forum, about two o'clock, some of us will be willing to stay around and visit with you. Just as what I'll call a program note, there's a possibility about 1.30 this afternoon that the B-1 bomber will make a low high speed pass outside on the airport. If that does happen, we're set up here electronically that we will cut to that event about 1.30, and you will have while you're participating with us today the very best seat in the house for that B-1 flying by. This potential, that may not happen today, and it could happen tomorrow. Let me introduce to you all of the participants in the forum today, and then we'll turn it over for some remarks. On my right here, Peggy Gilligan, who is the Deputy Associate Administrator for Aviation Safety. Next to Peggy, John Allen is the Deputy Director of the Flight Standard Service. Next to him, Bruce Johnson, Vice President for Terminal Services from the Air Traffic Organization. Next is Rick Day, the Vice President for EnRoute and Oceanic Services for the Air Traffic Organization, followed by Dave Bennett, who is the Director of the Office of Airport Safety and Standards. And Steve Wallace, the Director of the Office of Accident Investigation. And finally, but certainly not least, Dorenda Baker, who is our Deputy Director for Aircraft Certification Service. So you have with this group a wide cross-section of a lot of expertise of what's happening in FAA. We'll spend a few minutes talking to you about what's going on, and then we'll open it up to questions. And with that, let me move to Peggy Gilligan. Peggy? Thank you, Doug. And thanks to everybody for being here. And thank you for having us again at the Meet the FAA session. I do want to bring the administrator's regrets. Unfortunately, her schedule had an international trip that's starting today, so she's not able to be here. But she did ask me to bring her regrets and to report back to her on how the session goes, so I'm looking forward to that. We know there are lots of issues that I'm sure you want to talk about, so we do want to leave plenty of time to do that. But we want to start out by focusing, as I think we always focus at this session, on safety and the safety record and what you all and what we together are all doing to improve our safety record. This is a chart that we review, actually, every other week at a standing meeting in the Aviation Safety Organization. We look at this every two weeks just to keep our eye on the ball and to make sure we're really focused on what it is that we are all fundamentally about. And I think this tells a fabulous story. Now, we all know we've had a tragic fatal accident here at the show this year and an accident with some injuries as well. So we need to remember that we can never be vigilant enough. There's always more that we can do. But we should also take credit for the tremendous strides that we've made over time in improving the accident story for general aviation. So we want to use this as a bit of a backdrop. I also want to comment on the forums that I've seen here in the FAA facility. And I think it's, again, the example of what you and we are doing to try to keep our eye on that ball. It's all the right focus. It's all about safety. The sessions are sort of what can I learn? What can I do better? How can I improve my own performance? We're asking all the right questions so that we keep focused on constantly putting pressure on that accident line. And that's what we really appreciate from this community, your personal commitment. Obviously, we do a lot of work with the commercial industry. And there's an awful lot of ways we can force that industry to take on safety initiatives. What's really impressive with this group is it's up to you. It's up to you personally to take on these initiatives. There's very little that I could or would do to make you take these on. But because you are professionals, you are very mindful of your own personal safety and that commitment. The other thing I think we'd like to highlight is some of the things FAA is doing to reduce the burden for the general aviation community. I'm sure many of you were at Dr. Frazier's session earlier today. Dr. Frazier's here. If you've got any more questions for him, feel free. But I think, I hope you heard there, some of the things we're doing by rulemaking to lengthen the period in between medical examinations for some pilots. And we're doing a lot, you saw the MedExpress, the new automated way that you'll be able to fill out your forms. These are all things that we're trying to do to reduce the burden on those of you who are active participants in the general aviation community. In aircraft certification, and Darinda's here to answer any particular questions, we're supporting a lot of new product. And we were walking around before the session when we came in this morning. And when I first started coming to Sun & Fun, we had a lot of notional mockups, beautiful looking interiors all made out of paper pretty much for some products that now are delivering and are flying and are really gonna change the face of our system. And that's what I think is so phenomenal about this event. We really do get to see people who put their money where their mouth is and really put their hard work behind those words. And we're thrilled to be a part of that. And I think that's something again, FAA is doing to support the GA community. And as recently as yesterday, we had a change to the light sport aircraft rule that went on display that changes the weight limitations and that allows for retractable gears for amphibious aircraft. Things that you specifically asked us to change, which we saw needed to be changed. We went what's called direct final rule. It means it's immediately effective. And so those are the kinds of things that we're gonna keep our eye on. How can we reduce the burden while we're still pushing to make this record even better? I'd like to ask Steve Wallace now to come and speak about some of these specific data. Steve, you may know chairs, the JRC joint. Joint Steering Committee. I never get that one right. The General Aviation Joint Steering Committee for us along with Bruce Landsberg, who many of you saw in the last session. And we'd like to now focus on some of the particulars that are behind these targets that we're trying hard to reach. Steve. Thanks, Peg. So I'm kind of the scorekeeper for the safety organization. As Peg said, every two weeks we look at these and this is what we measure ourselves against. We don't measure ourselves against how many briefing papers we write or meetings we attend. We look at the net result here. So this is 1989 to today. And it's a real good story. Basically the red line and these are hard numbers of accidents. These are the numbers of GA fatal accidents. GA, the way the FAA uses the term for this measure is everything except scheduled 135 and 121. So they OPA measure a little differently. The NAL report doesn't look at Rotorcraft and doesn't look at anything over 12.5. This is everything but scheduled 135 and 121. Because we historically have not had a great deal of confidence in the use data, we haven't been able to publish a rate at fatalities or accidents per 100,000 flight hours or something like that. As we do that in the commercial sector, but here we don't, but we are shifting to that. We have a GA survey that we keep improving and it's gotten to the point where we're getting an increasing confidence in the use data. So we actually run a rate in the background that we're gonna shift the official measure in the next two years. But the red line is the total number of GA fatal accidents from 1989, if the numbers are hard to read, 487 down to 299 last year. The lowest number that we have had since we've been keeping records. You can argue a little bit about where the use has gone with fuel prices, but most of the closed studies look like we are improving safety a lot faster than fuel prices are going up. So I'm gonna look at a few of the subcategories. The green line is our target, our safety improvement target, we're well ahead for last year and well ahead this year. And the blue line compares where we are same time over the last 15 years or so. So I'm gonna look at different subcategories. Personal flying, this one is the sum total of aviation. This is personal flying. Personal flying is using an airplane but not in further, flying yourself not in furtherance of a business. And typically represents about two thirds of the fatal GA accident. So your $100 hamburger flights, just fun, pure pleasure of flying. That's mostly what we're looking at here. And we also think this type of flying may be the most affected by increases in fuel prices. Here's business flying. Business flying is, this is not corporate. Corporate comes next. This is using your own airplane in pursuit of a business. And this is really an increasing sector of general aviation. People are buying high performance, serious type cross country high performance airplanes and using them in furtherance of a business and flying themselves. And in fact, you can see there isn't, the blue line on the bottom shows that compared to where we were last year, we've had nine accidents as opposed to five this time last year. There's an uptick in here. What you need to try to sort out is the uptick in the business use of the aircraft. We have to work on getting those denominators clear. So we try not to chase upticks in the data, but we watch them closely to see if they start to represent a trend. And we look at this, the GA community looks at this to look at private sector and public sector interventions to try to reduce these rates. Corporate is very, very good. This is airplanes flown by professional pilots. Typically well-equipped, very conservatively operated airplanes have a very good accident rate. Ag is not a thing of widespread use, but we track the crop dusters as well. And instructional. Instructional typically represents about 10% or so of the fatal accidents. And this includes dual instruction and solo flight, vinyl flight reviews as well. It represents a higher percentage than that. I forget the number 16 or 18 of the overall use, in other words. So the rate is not higher in instructional. It's probably actually a little bit lower than in GA flying generally. Public use, this is not, this public use is aircraft used by municipalities, Sheriff's Department, Forest Service, that sort of thing, kind of a small category. And unscheduled part 135. These are on-demand charter flights. And this is amateur built. This is kind of an area of concern here. We've gotten kind of a bad start this year on amateur built aircraft. There have been some very good programs, EAAs, the mentoring programs, things like that. And there have been some great improvements in categories like first flight accidents. And yet there's work to be done. And we work closely with EAA on issues relating to amateur built accidents. And this is rotorcraft. Rotorcraft, we're having a great improvement this year. And rotorcraft, of course, spans a wide range, everything from an S-76 going out to the Gulf to instruction in an R-22. So this is quite a broad category there. This year's doing quite a lot better. And this is just kind of how we are doing against our goal this year. And so that's kind of it. I'll be happy to take questions later or I'll stay around after the presentation if anyone wants to discuss any more details on any of these categories. So thanks. Now turning to the air traffic side of the operation. Let me introduce again, Rick Day, who's the vice president for enroute and oceanic operations for the air traffic organization. Rick. Thanks, Doug. Good afternoon. You might wonder why does a enroute guy up here talk into a group of EAA? But as most of you know, with over 3,000 airports in the country, many of those are not controlled by a tower. They're probably controlled by a enroute controller. So along the lines of safety, it may be good for you to know that over the last three years, we have consistently pushed down to our collision risk or our operational air rate in enroute and oceanic. And in fact, this past year, we drove it down the most serious types of errors over 36%. So we're very proud of the things that we've been putting into providing the services that keep it as safe as we possibly can. We also have put a real push on and hopefully you've noticed is a real emphasis and focus on describing the weather to the pilot community. So it's something that we know that it's important to you, particularly as you fly into a non-precision approach or mountainous type airports or certainly at night. So it's one of those things that we've actually been getting some good recognition for our controllers for really putting a focus on that. One of the most exciting things, and I just want to touch on it for a minute, that you may not know, but we're just getting ready in this summer we'll be making a contract award for automatic dependent surveillance broadcasts. How many out there know what ADSB is? Few of you, okay, great. All right, so what you may not know is with the push towards continuing growth in the system, we expect that by 2020, we will not have a surveillance system that will be able to keep up with the needs as far as separation standards and being able to surveil the many, many targets as well as the precision that is already available and will continue to be available in the cockpit. So probably by the mid part of next decade, we will not be buying any more radars. We've made an announcement that we are moving to ADSB as the preferred surveillance source. So a couple of things that you get from ADSB, it drives its position or off of GPS, but not only the location of the aircraft, also the airspeed, the altitude, and the aircraft identification, but also has opened up a great deal of applications and services that are gonna be of value to improving safety and situation awareness in the aircraft. It's also good because it can be put in, it's very effective at low altitude, as well as in remote locations or mountainous locations. Where radar coverage seldom exists. So first, to get the ADSB capability, we're gonna start off between now and 2010 after contract award. We'll be putting it into Philadelphia where UPS has already been involved in its demonstration project. Philadelphia, Louisville. We're gonna go into the Gulf of Mexico and I'll talk about that briefly in just a second. Ontario, California, as well as Southeast Alaska. We'll also maintain the TISB and FISB sites that you may be aware of. Daytona Beach and Prescott Arizona, as well as along the East Coast and the Carolinas and on up into the Air Defense Identification Zone and all the way up to AOPA headquarters at Frederick, Maryland. So there's two services, the surveillance services and then the traffic information service, the display and the cockpit where you can see other aircraft as well as the flight information service is where we can push nodems and weather and other information to the cockpit, including terrain to have that better situation awareness. The services that will be implementing in future segments of the ADSB program are gonna be visual acquisition, visual approaches, final approach and runway occupancy and one that I'm pretty excited about and that is the airport surface and situational awareness. And this is gonna be great for pilots as they go into some of these uncontrolled airports to right now where you broadcast on the common frequency you'll be able to actually see aircraft on the surface and in the pattern. So that's a very encouraging future for us. It's also a huge opportunity for us to enhance safety through technology and it's really one of the foundational pieces of the next generation air transportation system. Up in Anchorage Center, you may have heard of the Capstone Project where we've been using ADSB in the western portion of the state in the Bethel community where we have about 200 aircraft equipped and we're actually providing separation between radar surveilled aircraft and ADSB surveilled aircraft. And it's really made a big difference there. So the MITRE, Federally-Funded Research and Development Corporation has estimated that to help reduce the accident rate by about 40%. Most of that by better situational awareness and control flight into terrain. We've also got, and I mentioned that we would talk about Gulf of Mexico. So in the Gulf of Mexico, the NTSB said that we've got an issue out there with all the transits to the, to and from the platforms. And as you know in that climate, you can oftentimes get restrictions of visibility very, very quickly. So in a arrangement or a letter of agreement with the Helicopters Association International, we've, and 13 other signatories, we've been able to agree to put in surveillance, ADSB, weather and communications. And they've agreed to equip their aircraft, give us real estate or space on the platform as well as power, telecommunications, transportation either by helicopter or boat. And also it really represents over $100 million in kind. We think that's the type of partnerships that are valuable in encouraging equippage as well as adding value and safety in some of these remote locations. We'll also be, as I mentioned, we'll have a contract award this summer. We'll also be, later on this summer, we'll be proceeding with a proposed role to mandate ADSB avionics in the cockpit. And I know many will be interested in that, but we are looking at an approach similar to what we did with transponders and that is to require them in controlled airspace and at busy airports. So there'll be more to come and certainly we're gonna encourage a lot of comments and input on that as we go. But it's exciting and it will add a lot of value. And I think for those of you that have already been flying around with the VFR or the IFAR type GPS units, you know that it's just another layer of safety that we can add there. Thank you. Thanks, Rick. I think you kind of have the flavor for the first few presenters that there's a lot going on in the system. It's growing rapidly. And our next presenter is Bruce Johnson who is the Vice President for Terminal Operations Air Traffic Organization, Bruce. Thanks, Doug. Well, it's great to be here. Let me dispel a rumor right off the bat. We know that the very light jets are here. You've all heard the estimates on the numbers of them that are gonna be flying around. We're not gonna institute sun and fun and Oshkosh procedures at all airports. Although, I do wanna say thanks to the controllers that are working in the event. They do an outstanding job every year. And I'd like to thank Lori Zuge out here in the audience who's our manager at Tampa and is the manager of the tower. Thanks, Doug. I just wanna give you just a few basic facts on terminal. A lot of these numbers are, when you hear the numbers on the cost, and what the budget is, it's pretty close for terminal and in-route, giving idea of what we've got. Stand-alone towers out in the system now, we have 123. Stand-alone tracons, we have 26. Tower-tracon combinations, we have 140 in the system. And we have two CCF, which are a combination of all with a little in-route thrown in. We've got 233 federal contract towers for a total of 524 facilities out there that we operate. In the field now we've got about 9,800 controller, supervisors, managers, and staff in terminal. It's about the same for in-route. 300, well, almost 400 people in headquarters and different functions there. Budget-wise, our budget for O7 on the opposite of the house, which is salaries and benefits, is about $1.83 billion. And our F&E program's in terminal for O7, about $530 million that we will use this year. Some of the things in terminal that you know about and hear about the STARS program, just about complete, get seven more facilities that we'll be finishing up in the very near future. ASR 11's, we have 72 of those systems going in. We had 144 that were going in, but we did have some budget cuts and 72 is the number now. ASR 9's, we've done service life extensions, probably one of the best radar systems that we've ever had. And like Rick said, we're not putting in any more radar systems after the 11, so we're doing extensions on those and they do an outstanding job for us. ATC BI-6's, which is secondary radar only. We're looking at those in a lot of places to get secondary, doesn't give us any primary return, but in fact it gives us good secondary radar return and we'll be using those at some places. We're looking at digitizing some of the ASR 8's, which will give us the ability to have digital radar at this through some of those systems, which is really gonna help. We're also looking at, some of these are R&D programs, multi-lateration, which is the ability to get a radar-like return on aircraft without having radar systems. We're looking at moving maps and cockpits, as you know, to help on taxing some of the more complicated airports that'll really be a help. Runway status lights, we actually have two of those systems in, one at Dallas-Fort Worth and one at San Diego. The pilots love it, it's a warning system with red lights. We've actually cut the runway incursions down to zero at DFW since those have gone in. We're looking at a low-cost surface radar system out at Spokane, Washington. Got real good results at that. And again, that's an R&D program. Biggest challenge is coming up, certainly the retirement bubble that we're in right now. Re-hiring the controllers and doing the training is a huge challenge and also the replacing of our infrastructure. Large number of facilities that I talked about, a lot of those are 40, 50, 60 years old. To give an example, we're finally replacing LaGuardia Tower for those of you that have flown in and out of there and you've seen the portholes on the side of the tower. So we're actually gonna build a new LaGuardia Tower and the cost for that tower will be somewhere between 90 and 100 million dollars just for that one tower. So big money and we got a lot of facilities out there. So we're gonna work real hard to do a good job for you and our commitment to you is we're gonna provide safety in the system and we appreciate you being here and we look forward to your questions. Thanks. Okay, we said that we were here to give you a little snapshot of what's going on but we're more interested in hearing from you. We've got aviation standard, we've got air traffic, we've got airports represented. So we wanna hear your questions and we'll respond to it. I would ask if you're interested, raise your hand so we can get a microphone in your hand. Please identify yourself and if you can keep your questions to sync, it will give us an opportunity to provide a fuller response to you. So if you're interested, raise your hand. Gentleman right here. Thank you. My name is Alan Engelhardt. My question concerns just what is a public interest? And specifically, of course, I'm talking about the H60 rule. Evidently, the FAA feels it is not in a public interest and it is a greater interest to take this rule changing process into years rather than weeks or months. Specifically, of course, on November 23rd of last year, just a few months ago, the FAA evidently felt that it was a public interest to allow all foreign pilots worldwide with foreign pilot certificates to fly into this country. Some of whom were sons of our World War II enemies are just coming up right now on H60. We've granted them the authority to fly in here at age 65, but those are the sons of the veterans that fought in World War II have to retire at age 60. Also, pilots now they're reaching age 60. If they want to continue flying large airplanes, have to go over to India and pay taxes to India and then they can fly at 777 right in here into this country. I want to know how is that a public interest which was decided and granted by the FAA on November 23rd of this year. However, pilots like myself who are just reaching age 60 have been denied the exemption. Mr. Allen, of course, you're the author of the letter I have here that said that it is not a public interest to a pilot like myself to continue flying and earning a living in this country. I have a wife and a 16-year-old son. They depend on me for support. I would question. So my question is I'd like to keep flying and why is it not in a public interest? I've been flying for United for 37 years. I've never had an accident, never had a violation, never failed one single check right. Even the FAA Indian. Let's not go too long here. Appreciate your comments. We had a session just before this with our FAA flight surgeon where we talked about the age 60. And I guess let me see if I understand your question and then we'll get somebody to respond to it. The question is age 60 and is it in the public interest? Okay, let's see if we can get your response. Allen, we've had this conversation, I know. I think just for the audience, we're mixing some apples and oranges. There is an international standard and the U.S. as a signatory to the Chicago Convention must comply with those standards. And it is true that IKO changed its standards effective last November. Other countries that comply with that standard are permitted to operate in accordance with those IKO standards and countries that belong to IKO must accept that. And that's why foreign operators who use pilots over age 60 are permitted now to operate into the United States. Separately, we at the FAA had our own standard and we are looking now at how to change that. And the dilemma for an exemption is that we really need to look at the whole group. There's no way to distinguish one individual pilot who may be turning 60 from all of the pilots who are turning 60. And the way we do that is through a general rulemaking procedure, which you know the administrator committed to and which we do have underway. But we agree and we understand how in the personal circumstances this is affecting individuals. The dilemma that we face is that, in fact, we have a process that we need to follow. And so we are pushing that process forward and we will be issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking to recommend the change. As you know, there is not consensus in the community about this change. We'll look at the comments and we will make our final decisions based on that process. Thanks, Peggy. Other questions? Question over here? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here and I'm gonna make my question a little shorter if I can. This question is since a huge mandate of the FAA is to keep people who fly on airplanes alive and a principle of taxation and fee collecting is that if you want less of an activity, you charge for it. And so aren't you concerned that if we went to a fee-based system for air traffic contacts and other things of that sort that affect aviation safety, that this would have an adverse effect on safety overall? That's right. I mean, Steve Wall, see? I'm with you, John. I flew 182 down here. Actually, the proposal, which is a proposal, it's not the law of the land yet, as you are well aware, is a fuel tax increase which would probably take the cost of that 182 at 12 gallons an hour up about $6 an hour. And that's all. And in fact, I mean, I'll be happy or others of us will be happy to stay afterwards and show you the exact pie charts. You've probably seen them already. Maybe Phil Boyer has a different pie chart. I don't know, but yeah. And that chart basically shows that if you look at the piston-powered GA cost to the system, it's about 6.6% or so. And that under the current system, the piston-powered GA community is paying with the current fuel tax about a half a percent. And under the proposal, which is a proposal, not done yet, it would go to 1%. And we have very carefully avoided charging a fee for anything that makes you safer. So in other words, I read the article in the AOP pilot about the European system and the idea of, I completely agree, if you had to pay $100 a final instrument flight plan, we'd certainly see fewer of them and we are not doing that. Or if you had to pay to get a weather briefing, you'd probably see fewer weather. So we're very concerned about the safety aspect of that. And beyond that, if you want more details on a proposal, more detailed discussion, stay afterwards and be happy to do that. Thanks. Thanks, Dave. Other questions? One in the back there. Oh, okay. I'm Marvel Fairburn. I handed out a list of questions here. I see number one's already been answered. There's question eight, and this ties in with the ads B also. Why aren't there severe weather updates available in the centers and towers? Christmas day, we almost lost a com air flight at Daytona Beach because the tower and approach control did not have the severe weather. And a tornado hit the airport as they were circling the land. And regarding ads B, if you folks would care to go through the main exhibit buildings, there are some very fine synthetic vision programs over there. And we had one last night at our EA chapter. And it may just leapfrog your whole ads B thing. AdSB. I already asked the question about AdSB. So one of the things about AdSB that synthetic vision won't do well, it'll give you great situation awareness. If you've heard the term required total system performance or performance based NASS, in areas where we have high congestion, you know that with our nav RMP required navigation performance, we can contain an aircraft in a small piece of airspace. Very precisely. But the problem is with our current surveillance update rates, we can't meet the standards for operating them safely closer together. So to add capacity in the system, you need a high update scan rate. Now the initial ADSB is just to put out a network and emulate the three or five mile separation that we have today. But clearly, as we gather data and are able to prove our safety case, the goal there would be then to use things like our nav RMP and a higher update surveillance rate ADSB and data link and pull this whole package together so that we can operate safely in highly congested airspace with great precision curved approaches. All those types of things I know you've read about. So it's already being done. Okay, meet me afterwards, we'll go over the exhibit or we'll talk about it. But I'm just saying our approach is to bundle these higher levels of performance capabilities, operational improvements into the system so that we can clearly not impose delay and any safety risks on the system by putting this higher level performance. As far as weather in the cockpit and Daytona Beach, Bruce may wanna talk about Daytona Beach since it was a towered airport. But I think you all know that we put out pyreps and center weather service advisories and sigmets and all those types of things. There's also an awful lot of subscription services where you can get information right to the cockpit. So there's a lot of capabilities out there and we share this widely between towered and the center operations and like I said in my opening remarks, it's a real focus of ours to make sure that we give the pilots the best picture available. As it relates to a tornado at Daytona, I don't know if you have any first hand information, Bruce, or not? Okay. And it's a good question and then we've certainly been asked this question. We've had two or three incidents this year because we've had such a severe weather year. We actually had a contract weather observer there at Daytona Beach who has a direct feed to the National Weather Service. That storm came on so quickly that even he was not forewarned. We actually have orders in all of our towers that talk about sustained winds. Typically it's around 40 knots. We start getting 40 knots of sustained winds and we typically are gonna get out of the tower, put the notice out and get out of the tower for the safety of the controllers. You know, one of the issues that kept coming up around this was why didn't we put weather radios in the tower? It's an interesting issue in that we're the ones responsible for getting the pilots the most accurate weather out there, which we have direct lines, punch a button. We go right to the center who has a center weather service with a meteorologist on duty who has Doppler radar that's seeing the same thing as the people that would be broadcasting over those radios. So it was an interesting concept that we would need to put weather radios in our towers to warn us of impending severe weather. We should know that. First, we have many different sensors on the airport, whether it's wind shear, low level wind shear, it-wiss service, different kinds of systems that would certainly warn us. So we're taking the feedback in that we're actually looking at a type of severe weather radio to put up in the towers. We're just checking with tech ops now to make sure that our technical group to make sure that anything that we would broadcast bring into the tower would not affect any of the radios going out. So we're looking at all that, but we certainly have sufficient weather information coming into every tower to be able to predict. Some storms come out of a system so quickly you'd never be able to predict it. Yeah, we had, oh yeah, it's integrated. It's integrated in every facility that we have. They can push a button, they can dial a number, they can be talking to the nearest center, they can be talking to the nearest tracon. It's within two seconds of when they want to get the report. So we're just, you know, we just have to do, we'll continue to try to do a better job at getting the weather out to the pilots when we know there's severe weather in the area. But that's, you know, it's tough, whether it's tough to predict at times, because again, especially in violent thunderstorms, you know how they move around. And the wind gusts can come and the wind gusts can go. So we'll continue to work on it. We'll continue to make sure that we get the weather out. Thanks. Other questions? I'm David Lowe. Most of you know of me if you don't know me. I'm the guy with the STC on the 140s and the Sport Pilot Rule and all that. Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about your budget. How much money is the FAA willing to expand out of its precious resources to support the four words that we are asking for exemption from since its original certification and the definition of a Sport Pilot, an airplane is a Sport Pilot can fly. Now with those words, forces your guy out here doing a ramp check, he finds a man flying an airplane that in all the paperwork and all the license in his pocket and everything is legal. Can he tell the guy he can go home legally in that airplane? Does he know have enough information at hand to do that? No, he doesn't. He has to go home on Monday and this is according to your directives from the FAA what your man's supposed to do when he does a ramp check which is go back, verify all the information he was given was correct, like the guy's pilot's license is good, his medical wouldn't run off on a Xerox machine or something. And verify that the information he got on Saturday is correct. You go out here and check a man, he got all the necessary information. That man has to go back Monday. Look up every single 337 that was ever issued on that airplane since the day it was new to prove that since its original certification it's never been out of the sport plane category even for one day for some abstract purpose. It also forces the people who could buy perfectly good airplanes that fit the rule today that were originally certified in that rule to do tremendous amounts of research to make sure that the airplane they're buying hasn't been out even though it's a 415C aircoop or a J3C65 today. Your people have got to take their time, their effort, their money, our money rather to take and do this research to verify what they're looking at is true. If they don't do that they're not doing their job. If they're not gonna do their job we don't need them out there doing it in first place. If they're gonna do their job then you do it fair and equal amongst all of us. So make sure that every single person gets a ramp check, gets a record check. This is complicated but in fact if the guy doing a ramp check happens to be an operations person and not a maintenance guy he don't even have direct access to records in Oak City you've got to go get a maintenance guy to do that. Then they have to pull up every single 337 and if it says simply modified in accordance with STC so and so on it they got to pull that STC and look to see what that STC did. 10 airplanes checked on Saturday can keep two people busy for five days. Can you go spend that much money to keep the 140s from flying is by light sport pilots? Not as light sport. Let's see if we can get an answer to your question. Yeah, would you give us your question again? I mean, boil it down. Desia, how you doing? We've talked a few times as everybody probably guesses. I don't know that I'm really gonna answer your question directly but I did want to give you a little bit of information on what we are doing. Reason I was maybe gonna bring Jim on up to help me out a little bit is that we are doing a lot of things to try to automate our services such that we can do more on the ramp. We are putting the 337s on a website so that they can be accessed. We are going to be giving our inspectors templates to work with and computers that they can take out on the line and access a lot of that information. So we won't be spending money to allow them to do the job that they're supposed to do when they're out on the ramp doing the checks. How much we're going to spend to do each and every check to ensure that everybody is treated exactly the same, I think was what your question is and I don't really have a good answer for that. I just am saying that what we will be able to do is a much more accurate assessment of each airplane and each pilot when we are out there. Do you want to add? Just to buttress what Dorenda said, we are going to have our inspectors out there with the tools where they can access this information that's really available. I was at the registry yesterday and I saw that there were pilots, there were ops inspectors who were accessing the registry as I was sitting there seeing it coming up on the screen and doing it in real time. We envision they can do the same thing when they get on the field having tablets connected via cell technology and we're fielding that, we're going to fund that and get those things out to them as well as handbooks, standardizing handbooks, bring them together so you don't have conflict between handbooks so that our inspectors go out with the same information and can access it through the internet on the road instead of being tied to their cubicles in their office or having to go back to the office. I've been on the road, I've been sensed about having inspectors sitting in their cubicles and tied to the computer, I want them out working with the public and given the right information so they can make the right decisions. We are funding that and we're funding as fast as we possibly can. Maybe not quite the answer you wanted but I think you're getting a level of feedback that's important. Other questions? Well, let's wait and see if we've got any other, any objections to one more time from the gentleman to the back. Hi, you mentioned earlier about non-federal towers, control towers and federal control towers. Are the non-federal towers funded by the FAA and what's the difference in, is there any difference in services or difference in personnel training? I guess I'm confused on why we have two separate control towers. Okay, good question. So we have federal contract towers, this program came in, advent after the 81 strike where basically took most of the VFR towers and they went into this group called federal contract towers. We've actually divided up the system into four different groups or four different contractors that now supply the controllers for federal contract towers across the country. So there's four different regions that do that. They provide the service, we do the certification on the controllers, we do evaluations of the facilities so that the standards are the same for all the towers. Oshkosh is a federal contract tower during the day. So we have 233 of them. I'll warn you, I'll warn you. Right here. Yeah, you could, yeah. Yeah, and if you need some, if you want some more information on federal contract towers and the program and how that's set up, we're budgeted, you actually have to meet a criteria, we call it a benefit cost ratio. Once you meet that and it's done with a formula, a lot of times the airports or the cities will put in for that that want a tower, you have to meet the criteria, have more than a 1.0 on what we call the BC and then you qualify for a contract tower. We pay the cost of the tower through the contractors. We actually have another part of the program now where people that have been in the program have fallen below this 1.0 indicator. We go into what we call a cost share program where if they go down to 0.76, then we would pay 76% of the cost and the airport of the municipality would pay the other 24% and that's called cost share. So we have those all over the country also. Other questions? Okay, we're on the repeat questions now as far as repeat individuals so if you don't have any others, we'll start back around. Start here in front. Well, my name's John Kang and I just wanted to do a quick follow up question for you, Steve. Am I to understand that the FAA is not proposing user fees for any segment of general aviation including corporate jets? Is that a correct statement? Well, what are you calling a user fee? Well, I'd like to, a little more clarity to your question would be helpful. All right, I thought user fee was clear. Steve said there's going to be a fuel tax as opposed to user fees. A fuel tax, I think I understand. My question is, do I understand correctly that there will be no user fees imposed for any segment of general aviation including business aircraft? And do you need help with user fees? No, I understand the user fees. I mean, the issue around the fuel tax obviously is getting a lot of attention. It's getting a lot of debate, a lot of conversation. There is a proposal for some charges, if you will, like airman certificate, registering an aircraft, things of that nature. But the general aviation piece of that would be generated principally by the fuel tax. Now, as a general aviation, if you go into class B airspace and fly through it, there's no user fee. If you would want to land at one of the primary airports, there would be a fee for that and it would be based on the size and type of the aircraft. Most of the funding for general aviation would come from the proposed change in the tax. Well, business jets would be included in that fuel tax as well. If you recall, at this point in time, I think general aviation is paying about 19.3 cents a gallon federal tax and a jet fuel for like a corporate jet is about 21 in a fraction of a sense. The proposal is that would go 270 cents a gallon, trying to build some parity, if you will, some fairness into the system. And I realize that the word fairness may resonate with you or not, depending on your point of view, if you happen to be an owner of a general aviation aircraft, you probably don't think a lot of that proposal for that additional expense. But we're trying to basically balance it out so that those who use the system pay a proportionate share. General aviation, for instance, historically has paid, and this is based most recently on 2005 information, about 16.3, 16.4% of the cost of the system is generated by general aviation. But general aviation with the current fuel tax is paying 3% of those costs. This proposal would move closer to that 16%, but it wouldn't be all the way up. It's actually about, I think it's 11% in that regard. Now if you've been paying 19 cents a gallon for tax on your fuel and it's proposing to go to 70, that's a significant increase. That's part of the proposal that was put in place by the administration on February the 14th. It was based on a number of years of activity, talking to a lot of individuals. We didn't just talk to big user groups, we talked to groups large and small, we got a good cross section of feedback from the general aviation community. The feedback was the tax on gasoline is probably the easiest and fairest way to do that. But the proposal came out on February the 14th, we're now a couple of months and a week, not quite downstream. And it's obvious that there's a lot of things in the proposal that the customers, those of you sitting in this audience, don't particularly like. It's important at this point in time as Congress is working to develop some legislation that will provide funding for the next 10 years for the aviation system of this country, arguably the best aviation system in the world, that that debate continues and that we have good legislation in place by the end of September. So we are encouraging everyone and even from our perspective, looking at as opposed to telling us what you don't, that you don't like the proposal, would you give us some suggestions and some recommendations as to how it should change? Now my good friend, Phil Boyer, and I have had some discussions on this over time, perhaps a number of you participated with him last evening at his town hall forum. And that's what these kinds of discussions are good for. That's why I will stay around with you and talk about this to whatever extent you want. We're basically about four or five minutes away from concluding, but we need to know what you think. And this, you don't impress me, this is my first time in this region after being the regional administrator in Seattle for a few years. You don't impress me as a bashful group. I've walked around among this group. I spent some time in the big yellow tent yesterday talking to, I don't know some of you in this room, but some of you about this. And it's important that we have, and I think we can all agree on this, that we have the safest system for aviation in the world. There is none better. And that that's what we're all about. We're all in this together and we wanna act like it. Now we don't necessarily agree on how we're gonna pay for it. And maybe how we're gonna implement some of the changes. But the reality is that this system is growing exponentially, even in the face of some increasing cost. We're gonna be seeing the very light jets, the micro jets coming at the rate of about 500 a year to where there'll be 4,000 of those flying around. You've got a lot of other aircraft that are coming out. So there's a lot of interesting challenges with the system and it's important that we're all way in on what's important to us. If you don't like a fee, if you don't like a particular provision, then tell us what you'd like instead. Because that's what we need to hear. And that's what makes this system a good system because people are able to participate in it. I think I've raised an ire or a question over here. Gentlemen. Paul Bergotti from Louisiana, quite a little town down the Mississippi River. I'd like to thank especially the FAA people that take care of us in Oshkosh and here, all the real workers, not so much the top end even though I've had lunch and dinner with the administrator. However, what I would like to mention is since you're talking about user fees or adding cost, certain people can afford the big jets, certain people, I've flown everything from the military, commercial triple seven to a nice Cherokee and J3. However, what I'm saying is right now since you asked the question, how to pay? My answer is this, let the ones that want to go in Class B, get all those extra services, let them pay. Let the guy that wants to fly the J3 at a thousand feet off his backyard or from small airport uncontrolled to another small airport uncontrolled, let him have the ride, set the system up. So it's set up that if you're going in the Class B, you're using the radar, you're using all those extra things that are nice to have, let them pay. But don't put it on, it's a typical government operation. Trust me, give me your money, I'll spend it better than you. That is the government. They put that T in Boston for a reason. We got away from England, not really. Hamilton went around and he said, hey, we make one government system, one money, so we can tax them. Your job is safety and to provide us with the service at an X number of dollar. What I'm saying is let the people that are flying the J3s, fly the J3s, they don't touch the system. I fly in the New Orleans area, if you're outside of the 30 mile window, you can take off from a bead of springs and you can fly all the way to Hammond, there's no tower, or you can go up to Franklinton and have the $100 Hamburg or thank God if you got a four gallon on our airplane, it's a little less. And your question is? No, he asked for a comment. My comment was, did you hear that? Yeah, user fee if you want or tax price or however you want to get the money in your pocket, but let the little guy alone. That's all. All right, thanks. Maybe you and I can go to Homer together. Yeah, we'll go down there with Charlie Hammond. We'll go down there. My son-in-law will go get fish. All right, thank you. Let me just comment. Getting now and it may not have made it to everybody is a set of some of the issues that we've heard people talking about and we heard it here today. And I think what I'm concerned about and I know Doug was trying to help, I'm not sure you've gotten the really clear proposal that's been put forward by the administration. So I ask you to please make sure you get a copy of these papers because there are no fees for general aviation. Other than if they go into the 30 top hub airports, there will be a landing fee. So I don't, so there are no fees. Yes, there's an increase in taxes and there are reasons for that. The towers that we just talked about, the contract towers are not included in those costs, John, because safety is so important. Flight services are not included in those costs because those are so important. So all we ask is that you just at least try to understand the depth of the proposal and we'll be here to help answer any of those questions that we can. So thank you all. That concludes our session. Thank you for joining us today, including your bird's eye view for the B-1. But we're gonna stay around. We wanna know what you think. We're not here to give you the company line. We wanna know what you think. So thanks for joining us.