I have mixed feelings about this. 1) It's nice that FAA reads newspapers and reacts in a sensible way 2) It's weird that they needed an article, rather than starting investigations after actual incidents.
I was just talking to an amateur pilot the other day and somehow this general topic came up.
The FAA works on an honor system. If they chased people around looking for violations and fining people (which apparently they used to do) then people would try to circumvent detection, or avoid declaring an emergency and end up creating a bigger one.
They need transparency for things to improve, so they expect you to self report and they bring the hammer down if you don’t by hitting you where it hurts: right in the flight certifications.
From what I’m seeing it looks like Virgin didn’t self report before the news folks got wind and the FAA heard it through the grapevine, so they’ll get a big fat wake up call, and if that doesn’t get their attention then things will get much worse for them. Or, this is just SOP and an angle that sells ads and so it’s being hyped while nothing particularly egregious is happening from the FAA’s point of view.
Can second this. A couple decades ago the FAA was pretty tyrannical in their approach to compliance. Among other things they'd commonly stick inspectors at random airports and run through everyone's paperwork as they came in, handing out incredibly harsh punishments to anyone out of compliance. This garnered a lot of distrust from the community and lead to people devising ways of avoiding them as well as a general sentiment of hiding errors so they wouldn't get aggressively sanctioned.
Unusually for federal agencies, the FAA actually reversed course on this behavior and generally just tries to come down on egregious cases. People are encouraged to report on safety slips and near-misses using NASA as an unbiased intermediary. They've been known to be lenient towards minor negligence (ie. unintentional mistakes, airspace/runway incursions, etc) if the pilot recognized it and reported on it for the sake of providing stats for policy decisions.
All that said, more recently where the FAA has stopped, insurance has picked up. Insurance companies have been quick to jump on the availability of more sophisticated flight recording/tracking and the prevalence of social media to enforce their own views on aviation safety. Rates have been skyrocketing and it's becoming much harder to insure anything that isn't a simple fixed tricycle gear utility category certified 2-4 seater.
Yep, no "more" Ramp Checks. They are pretty rare, the joke the CFI tell new students is if you know what you're doing, your foreflight/pilot license really is just a piece of "paper."
But then the checklist for pre flight is supposed to scare you into compliance, and that all these rules were created because it had cost someone blood. Many seasoned pilots blood too.
While this is off topic, from the original post and my reply - just confirming that inspectors at small aviation airports are very, very rare.
> That honor system didn't seem to work very well on Boeing.
This logic is how everything gets ruined.
You have a system which has caused air travel to have two orders of magnitude fewer fatalities than ground travel despite operating at much higher speeds, but the system doesn't prevent 100.0% of the evil.
Then the instance it didn't prevent is used to justify tightening the screws, even if that makes things less rather than more safe for the reasons discussed.
Because people have recency bias, and using this as an anchor, argue their point of view (aka, their political beliefs), rather than argue for the truth.
The point of honor system isn't to put swift immediate justice on every infraction. It is to eliminate dishonest players from the long game.
If you are dishonest it usually is your modus operandi. You are not dishonest just once. When you get away with something once it becomes easier the next time.
But, as we say in Poland, lies have short legs. If you lie long enough you are bound to be caught one way or another.
The honor system means that once you get caught the punishment will be disproportionately painful, to make it impractical to be dishonest in the long run and to deter others from doing the same.
You're not wrong, though it's worth noting there are two different things going on there. In terms of operations (flying aircraft) the honor system makes sense. You want everyone learning from each others mistakes so you need to encourage a culture of voluntary transparency. That means you are actively trading leniency in exchange for transparency to keep everyone talking. On the other side, engineering, there are very well defined frameworks for how you design, fabricate, test, and certify airframes. There's an argument to be made for working to minimize the pointless red tape (and oh boy is there a lot of pointless red tap) but self certification in the ream of purely capitalistic corporations isn't the right play. Individuals can be convinced to care about reputation but corporations are so profit driven and carefully structured to avoid liability that it's largely pointless to attempt to map individual morality onto them.
I took this to mean that the board will never explicitly tell you to break the law. They'll just make it impossible to carry out your job unless you do. Then, when the hammer falls you're a "rogue employee" that the company couldn't possibly have foreseen.
> An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed that Virgin Galactic “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance” and that an “investigation is ongoing.”
So I don't know where that whole narrative of the article causing the action is coming from. The investigation was already ongoing and it seems highly unlikely that bureaucrats rush something within 24 hours just because of an article in the newyorker.
I also doubt that the FAA investigation would have much to do with the major narrative of the article.
From their perspective, the flight went off course for 2 mins, and they're looking for the proximate cause. They're looking for a specific safety issue, not any underlying generalized sense of a rotten safety culture at the company.
The acute problem might lead directly to a bigger general issue, if there's some direct evidence of fudged risk analysis or some specific, similar, overtly wrong behavior.
But more likely, it'll just be: we misjudged how it would handle that specific wind and were blown off course. Or something similar.
ETA: Has it even been established that the warning light/entry angle was the cause of or directly related to the airspace violation?
Either they deviated by a large margin or the area they were cleared for was too small because you don't just get mildly blown off course enough to exit a decent clearance area.
Maybe. There are lots of explanations for not having a larger test area, or for miscalculating a manually piloted crafts mach 3+ trajectory.
But you're missing the bigger
point.
It may have been completely unrelated to weather. By "something similar" I mean an innocent, isolated, non-cultural and non-conspiratorial explanation, that won't involve the FAA digging (or having to dig) any deeper than the superficial proximate cause.
It was a test flight of a manually piloted craft. To some extent, things will not go as expected.
Boeing and Russias last manned flights weren't manually controlled, and both had significant problems- early rocket shutdown and an unintentional, initially unstoppable thruster firing.
Yeah it needs investigating, but it's hardly unexpected or uncommon, especially for a test flight.
Regarding 2, it makes sense to me. The FAA's purview is vast. They handle matters pertaining to all airspace in the USA. That includes commercial and private flights, drones, local government, and (of course) space flight. (And maybe even military flights, too, IDK). Is there such a thing as an "FAA detective" that preemptively goes on-sight to verify the reports they receive? Like most agencies, they function primarily on a self-reporting basis, relying heavily on the fear of retributive sanctions to ensure that they aren't being lied to in those reports. Can you imagine the cost of investigating everyone and everything the FAA is supposed to regulate?!
My sense is that, unusually among government regulators, the FAA is generally competent and cares about the real consequences of their in/action - both because the subject is life-and-death table stakes, but also because when there's a disaster the FAA itself is, by default, one of the "usual suspects". And rightly so.
Personally I see this as a very optimistic story about a regulator that actually does its job.
Hah. I have a love/hate relationship with the FAA. Funny story: a building was something like a foot over spec, about a mile off the end of a regional airport and the FAA found out. I do not envy the builder.
I've known some FAA people and they're some of the more interesting types I've come across.
I'm not sure that's the reason you're being downvoted. You could be being downvoted because the BBC article in the OP says that there was a New Yorker article and The FAA have said there is an investigation. You're concluding that the FAA is doing the investigation because of the New Yorker article. Another (perhaps simpler) explanation of the same facts is that the FAA were doing an investigation (either because of what the agents on the ground told them or because of the flight data or whatever) but it wasn't reported in the press (and the FAA didn't make a statement) until the New Yorker article came out.
Also you're probably further being downvoted because whining about being downvoted is a surefire way to get downvoted.
Good they were in the room at the time. I would absolutely want a public accounting for the gap between what the regulators in the room saw vs. why the grounding after the article. Abundance of caution over a nothing-burger? Ok, just say so. A bad call made by the regulators in the room? Ok, human error exists. An intentional effort to keep the regulators need-to-know or an intentional looking the other way? Big problem.
Control room doesn't see everything the cockpit sees. Particularly not in a pilot-centered vehicle design like Virgin Galactic's. Having a representative in the room, moreover, doesn't mean it's someone qualified to look for problems. Even if they are, it's a big room with lots going on.
Well it says “after” the article, not “because of,” so it’s possible the FAA was planning to do this anyway.
It’s even possible that the causality goes the other way: that the FAA’s movement toward a grounding was the spur for sources to reach out to a reporter.
According to at least one insider who is well qualified to speak on the issue, the FAA is not competent, should not be trusted: https://qht.co/item?id=26376549
"FAA safety engineer goes public to slam the agency’s oversight of Boeing’s 737 MAX"
I am convinced that at the moment fierce competition in this area causes competitors to try to use any excuse possible to do anything they can to stall opponents.
Getting any small problem to have as much publicity as possible? Yeah, sounds about right.
Pretty sure an anomaly like this would not be happening if space didn't get commercial attention.
only really have to look at the Boeing fiasco to realize the FAA has lost it's tooth. Many companies will take the risk for profit or glory while the FAA take a reactive rather than preventative approach.
I have some experience with the aviation authorities, and they are generally competent. And I would say maybe even slightly too nitpicky, just like the general public is very nitpicky about every aircraft accident or incident. It is possible that they just didn't know about the issue it.
Did you know, for example, that every bird collision, no matter how small the bird was, has to be registered as a flight incident and investigated? Or that every TCAS warning is a flight incident too, even if everyone knew exactly what was going on and there was no real danger? And I do not think it's wrong, you hit a bird every blue moon and you get extra hour or a few hours of paperwork, it's okay with me. The point is they're very detailed.
That’s rather silly. The FAA allowed those planes to fly in the US, with the flaws that lead to those deaths. They also manipulated test results in order to facilitate recertification of the planes after the crashes.
And because of that the FAA was entirely right to type-certify the 737 MAX (which through international agreements is widely recognized) and it's just totally random that they after the crashes grounded them and required lengthy rework?
