The US Federal Aviation Administration has corrected an “inadvertent” error in a rulemaking that could reduce the cost of complying with a regulatory mandate on owners for thousands of US-registered experimental aircraft.

When the FAA published a 2010 mandate to install new transponders compliant with the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system, it left out a key word in the rulemaking.

The 2010 rulemaking requires all aircraft to carry transponders approved by the FAA under the technical standard order (TSO) certification process.

Until that rulemaking, the FAA allowed owners of experimental aircraft – a vast US industry – to be equipped with systems that meet the performance requirements of TSO equipment, even if their devices were not specifically approved by the FAA.

The new rule appeared to change that policy and force experimental aircraft owners to buy TSO-certificated hardware. Such equipment costs a minimum of $5,000, which, according to the Experimental Aircraft Association, can amount to between a third or a fourth of the value of many kinds of home- or kit-built aircraft.

Last October, industry groups challenged the language in the 2010 rulemaking during a meeting of the Equip 2020 ADS-B working group, says Jens Hennig, vice-president of operations for the General Aviation Manufacturers Association.

The FAA responded by changing the language on 9 February to allow for experimental aircraft to meet the “performance” of TSO hardware.

As a result, says Hennig, “experimental aircraft do not have a mechanism to install nor are they required to equip with TSO-A equipment”.

Although broadly supported by groups like the EAA and GAMA, the FAA’s mandate to equip all aircraft with ADS-B Out compliant transponders by 2020 contains several unpopular provisions, including the recently deleted language that affected experimental aircraft.

A key issue is the FAA’s insistence on using a wide area augmentation system (WAAS)-compliant GPS chip for position reporting in all ADS-B Out transponders. The general aviation community has pressed the FAA to reduce that performance specification and dramatically reduce the costs of compliance.

“This technical correction is a good first step, but there is much more work to do,” said Doug Macnair, EAA’s vice-president of government relations.

Source: FlightGlobal.com