Here you go.
Wireweenie and dga are two of the most knowledgable folks among a really, really knowledgable group.
I am installing the neat Garmin GTR-200 in Cubs and Stearmans (not professionally - mostly for me) and am recommending it. One Stearman guy just asked if a TSO radio was required - I said that I did not think so except for commercial operations. Any opinions or references?
www.supercub.org
It is an interesting discussion, although it devolved a bit in the reg discussion.
I disagree with this statement in that discussion (emphasis added):
"Some one will have to show me what part of a radio install is a major. And then they'll have to show me what requires a field approval for a non TSO'd radio. I don't care about AC's and instructions for Inspectors. I need to see it in the FARs. FAR's trump all opinion and advisory stuff.
If any mechanic tries that crap about 'it's the way we do it here' or 'I've always done it this way' but wont show you the justification in the regs, find a better mechanic/IA and refer the old one to FAR 65.71, (a) (2)."
I spent 12 years working for the feds writing, interpreting and enforcing regs. I don't like how the feds do it, and it's gotten progressively worse over time as attorneys have predominated over field staff and subject matter experts. But here's my $0.02 on regs and where people misunderstand what the "law" and the "regs" say:
1) The law consists of the statute, the regulations, and subregulatory guidance in the form of guidance and advisory letters. ALL OF IT is the law.
2) There is however a pecking order based on level of authority and review.
a) The statute is pre-eminent as it was what was passed by congress. The purpose of the regulations are to interpret the statute and give it enough meaning and identification of scope to be useable in the field. The general idea is that the politicians and the young and overly earnest/ambitious hill staffers who actually write the statutory language usually don't know beans about the actual subject matter, regardless of how many committee meetings they've attended.
b) That's why after the law is passed, the statutory language is then sent to the cognizant federal agency for that program to then write the regulations. The idea is that the cognizant agency will have subject matter experts and people with actual field experience in the area being regulated who can translate the statutory language into something that actually makes sense and can be implemented in a reasonable manner.
c) Unfortunately, it often doesn't work that way. Increasingly, the people who write the regs are attorneys who have little or no actual field experience and understand the program being regulated in only very general terms, if at all. As attorneys, they also tend to put less stock in the opinions of field staff and subject matter experts than they should. Unless the intent of the statute was abundantly clear in the committee meeting notes, those attorneys are prone to be extremely conservative/defensive and define congressional intent via a narrow read of individual passages. Those narrow reads often result in interpretations that don't reflect congressional intent and/or the needs and practicalities of the program being regulated that are blatantly obvious to the people actually working in the field or who are being regulated.
d) There's also a tendency for those attorneys to be very career minded and avoid making anything that could be perceived as a mistake, regardless of the cost to the end user or taxpayer. They value consistency, even when the answer is consistently incorrect and seldom will change an incorrect opinion once it has been rendered - unless forced. As a result it's common to go too far, overreach, over apply and claim it's being done in the interest of safety. Those are the agencies that ignore public comment and publish the regs with few if any changes.
You'll also find agencies that blame congress claiming that's what the statute required and it's out of their hands. You can spot those agencies when you see regulations that are nothing more than regurgitated or rephrased versions of the statutory language.
The application of a repetitive wing spar AD to 7 and 11 series aircraft due to failures in 8 series wing spars with tip strike and overturn damage histories is a prime example of all of the above - it was a massive over reach done claiming "safety" and ignoring reams of data and public comment showing it wasn't an issue in aircraft with no damage history. At most a one time inspection would have been sufficient, with subsequent inspections only needed after a tip strike or over turn.
The FAA is attempting to do the same thing again with the proposed PA-28 wing spar AD, where two failures in high time (over 7000 hours) retractable wing aircraft (where the spar loads are much different), used in an intensive training role with not only a very high number of landings, but also a high number of hard landings are being used to justify applying a very expensive and difficult to comply with AD to the entire PA-28 fleet. The difference is the PA-28 community is huge and packs a much bigger punch when it comes to both the volume of public comment, and the estimated cost of compliance. So far it's been rolled back to inspections based on a service hour formula derived from 100 hour inspections as a proxy for intensive use. But if you don't have complete logs it becomes a requirement at 5000 total hours regardless of use. In fact, it should be limited to retractable gear PA-28s with over 7000 hours of intensive use - over 70 100 hour inspections.
3) The proposed regs are required to go out for a 60 day public comment period in the Federal Register. The agency then has to respond to each comment (although they can grup similar comments) and publish the comments and responses in the Federal Register for 30 days before the regs can be implemented. Unfortunately the requirement is to seek and publish comments. There is no obligation to modify the proposed regs no matter how valid the public comments. Some agencies will double down with arguments for the language or rationale they are using. Others will just say "we disagree" and publish the regs as written anyway. It takes a LOT of public comments strongly opposed to the way a reg is written to force an agency to change the language.
4) Once the final regulations are published, the agency will from time to time get questions, requests for further clarification, or come upon situations that they feel warrant further clarification. That can result in sub regulatory guidance in the from of advisory circulars or other publications that further expand on how the agency interprets or enforces the regulation as it pertains to specific issues.
That often gets abused, particularly over time as an agency experiences regulatory creep in the scope to which a requirement is applied. The requirement is that any subregulatory guidance that substantially changes the way a regulation is interpreted must go out for public comment. That requirement is seldom met as the definition of "substantial" is subjective, especially when the agency nibbles away at something in small bites spread over several years, until a prior common practice is now deemed totally illegal.
5) The agency will also respond to individual letters and requests from people on very specific questions. These letters are often addressed at the field office level and they can be very inconsistent, based on the perspective of the person responding. A field experienced and focused staff person will usually provide a much different and more field focused response than a attorney who is focused on a narrow read of the law and the regs. This causes concern for consistency for the inside the beltway attorneys, and the folks at the top then seek to reduce or eliminate the pro-field responding staff by installing managers and supervisors at the local level who'll tow the "narrow read" interpretations and not allow those pro-field responses to go out.
6) All of the sub regulatory guidance is "law", but in this order:
- Statute;
- Regulations;
- General sub regulatory guidance and publications; and
- Individual letters and responses.
The lower level items cannot conflict with the higher level items as the higher level items are pre-eminent. However, the lower level items are almost always more specific and detailed. That's where the regulatory creep starts, and once the volume of sub regulatory guidance is sufficient, it gets used to justify itself when it's in conflict with how the regulation used to be interpreted.
