Aviation is a poster child for economic stagnation. Yes, airline travel has gotten cheaper and safer—great. But every other aspect of aviation has struggled or even regressed. As I’ve noted many times, we had supersonic travel across the Atlantic from 1976 to 2003. Today, not even the world’s richest travelers can fly that fast.
Another part of aviation that has suffered over the last half-century is general aviation, particularly its low-end segment, personal aviation, in which people fly themselves to their destinations instead of hiring a private pilot to do it. Aviation is simply not practical personal transportation today. Where, one might ask, is my flying car?
Lately I have become obsessed with the Federal Aviation Administration’s new MOSAIC rulemaking on light-sport aircraft. The agency’s proposed rule is smart, counterintuitive, and potentially transformative. If not literal flying cars, it could make personal aviation in general much more viable. It’s an action that deserves both applause and careful study.
The safety continuum
FAA is primarily a safety regulator. In 1996, in order to address perceived conflicts of interest after a handful of airliner crashes, Congress removed the agency’s authorization to promote the development of civil aviation, saying that safety was the highest priority. FAA takes its safety mandate very seriously. Importantly, consistent with Congressional direction, it doesn’t apply the same safety standards to all activities, but instead explicitly adopts a “safety continuum,” which is worth reviewing before we get to the content of the MOSAIC rule.
The safest form of aviation is on type-certified Part 25 airliners flying on Part 121 airlines by highly trained, licensed commercial airline pilots. The explicit safety target that FAA and other regulators have settled on is that catastrophic events should be “extremely improbable,” meaning one per billion flight-hours. The regulation of this kind of aviation is nothing short of maniacal. Consequently, it can cost billions of dollars to develop a Part 25 airliner through type certification.
Next along the safety continuum come type-certified Part 23 aircraft. These include most general aviation aircraft, and they can be up to 19,000 pounds of maximum takeoff weight and include seating for up to 19 passengers, although many of them are small four-seaters. To fly a Part 23 aircraft, you must have a private or recreational pilot’s license. In 2017, FAA modernized the Part 23 rules to be less prescriptive, allowing the use of consensus standards (most commonly, ASTM’s).
The third spot on the continuum are light-sport aircraft (LSAs). This was a category FAA created in 2004 to fill a spot on the safety continuum between Part 23 aircraft and experimental amateur-built aircraft. No type certification is required, but the aircraft must still be built according to consensus standards. Under today’s rules, LSAs are subject to a number of restrictions to limit the size of the category: maximum speed is 120 knots, maximum weight is 1,320 pounds, the aircraft can only have 2 seats, and it can be powered only by one engine, which must be reciprocating. If you only want to fly LSAs, you don’t need a full private pilot’s license. FAA created a sport pilot certificate that can qualify you to fly an LSA with half the flight training.
Next along the safety continuum come experimental aircraft. This is America. You can build any aircraft you like, and if you can build it, you can fly it, subject to rules designed to limit the risk to the rest of the airspace and people on the ground. You can also buy a kit aircraft from a manufacturer and build it yourself. These aircraft are not only not type certified, they are not necessarily built according to any particular standards. You must be at least a private pilot to fly an experimental aircraft.
Rounding out the unsafe end of the safety continuum come ultralights. It turns out that FAA is perfectly willing to let you kill yourself in a flying vehicle as long as that vehicle weighs less than 254 pounds and can’t exceed 55 knots, and you do it in the daytime and in an unpopulated area. You need zero pilot training, the aircraft doesn’t have to be registered, and it doesn’t have to be built according to any particular standards.
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