Guardians of the Henhouse

This is the second post in a series on the two-decade resistance to ADS-B In, the technology the NTSB says would have prevented the Flight 5342 collision (part one: The Original Sin).

Most people have a fairly simple view of how aviation safety policies are set. I certainly did before January 29, 2025. I assumed that safety experts at the FAA monitored new technologies and evolving conditions in the airspace, developed risk mitigation strategies, and communicated resulting safety requirements to airlines and private aircraft operators.

What I’ve discovered instead over the past 19 months is that the tail is wagging the dog. The very corporate interests that the FAA is supposed to be regulating play an outsized role in setting their own rules or, in some cases, delaying them from ever taking effect.

Technical standards for aviation safety typically do not originate from within the FAA. This function is delegated to a private non-profit organization, RTCA Inc. (originally the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics).

The FAA participates in RTCA activities, but the agenda is largely driven by aviation industry interests such as airlines, equipment manufacturers, and trade organizations.

To be fair, there are some benefits to industry involvement, since industry participants bring valuable expertise to the standards process. It also ensures that the FAA does not set policies that are impractical for the industry to implement.

The problem is that it puts the organizations that the FAA is supposed to be regulating in the driver’s seat when it comes to setting the agenda for aviation safety, as well as controlling the pace that new technologies are adopted.

It’s also an exclusive club.

You must be an RTCA member to participate in the process. And you can only become an RTCA member if you are an organization “doing business in aviation” and willing to pay hefty annual dues. The traveling public has no voice in the process and no right to visibility into the RTCA’s work.

In 2018, the FAA made a change that eliminated the need for RTCA to comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 (FACA), which requires public transparency by external government advisory committees in the form of open meetings, public access to documents, and detailed meeting minutes.

Now, the club members are free to operate behind closed doors.

When the FAA decides to initiate action on a specific safety topic, in many cases informed by the RTCA’s work, it issues a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM). This is often accompanied by the formation of an aviation rulemaking committee (ARC) to work through the details and provide the FAA with specific recommendations for the eventual rule.

If you read my previous post and were perplexed about why the FAA’s rulemaking notice for ADS-B only proposed requiring half of the solution — the seat belts without the buckles — I have a data point for you.

Eighty-two days before the 2007 ADS-B rulemaking notice was issued, the FAA had already formed the rulemaking committee for ADS-B. Rulemaking committees are private industry’s second bite at the apple when it comes to writing the aviation safety rulebook. Many of the same industry interests that had already been influencing the direction of ADS-B within RTCA assumed positions on the FAA’s ADS-B rulemaking committee.

The 2007 rulemaking committee charged with developing the ADS-B requirements had two co-chairs. One was an employee of the Air Transport Association of America, which changed its name to Airlines for America (A4A) in 2011. (For simplicity, I’ll refer to them as A4A moving forward.) A4A is a Washington, D.C.-based trade organization funded by the major airlines, including American Airlines, to advocate for their interests.

The second co-chair was an employee of the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA), another Washington, D.C.-based trade organization funded by private aircraft operators to advocate for their interests. In case you were worried that no one was looking out for the interests of private jet operators, NBAA has it covered.

The Regional Airline Association (RAA), another trade organization funded by regional airlines, including PSA Airlines, the operator of Flight 5342, had a seat at the table. So too did the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), a membership organization for private pilots and small aircraft owners.

What do these organizations all have in common?

1. They are lobbying organizations with registered lobbyists and political action committees (PACs) that make direct campaign contributions to members of Congress.
2. The members funding each of them would collectively be the ones to incur the cost of upgrading the avionics in their aircraft if ADS-B In became an FAA requirement.

Do you think these influential organizations took the NTSB and airline pilots’ appeal to require ADS-B In to heart and fought valiantly to make it happen?

Or do you think they spent the next 18 years and counting using their positions in the process — and their lobbying might on Capitol Hill — to prevent the organizations paying their bills from incurring the cost of ADS-B In equipage?

You probably don’t need to wait for my next post to guess correctly.

To be clear, organizations like A4A, NBAA, RAA, and AOPA have the right to advocate for the interests of their members.

But there is a phrase I used to use often when I was still parenting Spencer: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

It applies here.

How many times have you heard an airline tell you that safety is its number one priority in a preflight safety video or CEO statement after an accident?

It’s gross to say this while simultaneously funding trade organizations that are slow-rolling new safety requirements that independent experts — and the pilots flying your planes — say will reduce the likelihood that your customers and employees will end up dead on your watch.

There were many actions by many people in many roles at many organizations that contributed in some way to the Flight 5342 tragedy. I made a decision early on after losing Christine and Spencer that I could find peace with mistakes made before January 29, 2025, if I saw clear evidence that the person or organization that made them recognized their mistakes, learned from them, and committed to correcting course.

I’ll write about some examples where this has happened in the future.

But I’ve seen no evidence of learning and course correction from the aviation industry. They’re still running the same ADS-B In resistance playbook they were in 2007.

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