Not the person you are responding to, but as someone who probably feels the same way, I'm ok with someone disrupting my local taxi monopoly by having someone who is not certified driving the car that is taking me to the airport, because I can largely agree that most humans can drive a car. I'm much less ok with the person flying my airplane not being certified.
But an ATPL (airline transport pilot license) is hard and much more rare, unlike CPL it requires significant experience and training. Those are what you want for an airline. "Commercial pilot license" (CPL) is something that even I as a private pilot can rather easily add to my repertoire, it does not require much experience.
Some answers to the question "Difference between CPL and ATPL":
General aviation aircraft are quite safe. I don’t have data on hand to back this up on mobile, but I’d wager more than half (honestly, more) of those GA incidents are pilot error, whether operationally or maintenance-related. Checklist culture and attention to detail is important, and has reasons for existing.
It’s a perfectly fine hobby if you respect it, and there’s no sense discouraging otherwise qualified folks from flying. GA is already in severe decline.
My life insurance policy specifically denies a claim if I'm flying general aviation (private plane). It is that much more dangerous than commercial (on par with driving in a car).
"The National Transportation Safety Board found that in 2011, 94 percent of fatal aviation accidents occurred in what’s called general aviation. That category includes private small planes flown by amateurs as well as professionally piloted corporate flights in high-powered aircraft, such as the Gulfstream IV jet that crashed in May in Bedford, Mass., killing all seven people on board. By contrast, commercial aviation had no fatal accidents that year. Statistics from the N.T.S.B. show that general aviation aircraft average nearly seven accidents per 100,000 flight hours, compared with an average of 0.16 accidents per 100,000 hours for commercial airlines."
Your insurance company sounds like a bag of dicks. Do they also deny a claim if you ride a motorcycle without a helmet, which is legal? What about skydiving, or skiing a black diamond course, or attempting Longs Peak in the winter without three layers on?
Sometimes I forget the USA centric nature of forum until I read riding without helmet is legal... :0
I've see motorcycles without helmet last time I was down south in the fall and it scares the absolute beejesus bonkers out of me :/
(I've been riding for a decade, do occasional dirt trails, and have doing motorsport rallying a while back, but never enough of a daredevil to mount a bike without helmet and armour)
Riding without a helmet is not universally legal in the US.
In the past there was pressure from the federal government on state governments to enact more universal laws about wearing helmets. Now many states only require that young riders wear helmets and a handful don't have any rule. Here is an overview with a map, too: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/laws/helmetuse/mapmotorcycle...
> Sometimes I forget the USA centric nature of forum until I read riding without helmet is legal... :0
It varies by state; this is one of those occasions where the federal government leaves it up to each state to mandate as they please. You might be surprised to learn that Georgia, a deeply Republican (i.e. anti-regulation) state, has strict requirements for motorcycle safety including mandatory helmets for any vehicle classed as a motorcycle.
Republican has come to mean more "anti-authority" with respect to regulations, and not even necessarily less, but just less ones which hurt private profits. It does not really any longer mean 'against ones which hurt individual liberties.'
Usually when you apply, they ask if you do or plan to do any of these things. If so, they may decline to offer a policy, or offer one with a rider that excludes those activities. I’m a low-time pilot and my life insurance won’t cover me for plane crashes either.
Yeah, I've looked at AOPA and others but I'm a bit too low-time to get favorable rates, and now I'm a lapsed pilot who hasn't flown in a few years, so it's on the backburner for now. Thanks though!
I don't know about life insurance, but I know every travel insurance policy I've ever taken out specifically excludes skydiving and skiing unless you pay extra for a special policy.
Also, motorcycles without helmets!?!?!?!?!?!?!? America, I presume?
Many people ride motorcycles for pleasure in America. Motorcycles are a dangerous mode of transportation (more than cars, buses, etc.), even if you wear a helmet. If you are going for maximum pleasure/risk then, if the pleasure is much higher without a helmet, it is rational to not wear one, if you are riding for pleasure.
Commuting on a motorcycle, you should wear a helmet. Pleasure ride on the weekends, maybe not. Let the person make the decision. Seems good to me. America.
It is insane to ride a motorcycle. Once you decide that you want to risk riding a motorcycle for pleasure, maybe the increased pleasure of not wearing a helmet is worth it. Why would you ride a motorcycle at all for pleasure, if your philosophy of life is safety first?
Because safety and pleasure are not mutually exclusive. If your question was valid, skydivers wouldn't use parachutes and skiers would wear shorts and tank tops.
Just because one wants to enjoy a risky activity doesn't mean one has no common sense or self-preservation instinct.
Free climbers, astronauts and political dissidents must also be insane, and not understand this, either? Or their utility function is simply maximized at a place where yours is not.
I wouldn't smoke, ride without a helmet, etc, but who am I to say you are wrong for doing so? There are many people who would not sign up for a trip to Mars, but I would. Who are they to tell me I am wrong for a wanting this?
It's just insane to ride a motorcycle in the more populated areas of the US - with or without a helmet. A friend of mine works in a skilled nursing facility. Most of the younger males who end up there are because motorcycles. While wearing helmets saved their lives, many of them will be disabled in some way the rest of their lives.
I’ve been to a couple of motorcycle accidents (I worked as an ambulance driver), and I was surprised how little they got hurt. Most people here only drive with full protective gear, and it helps a lot.
Kids driving on mopeds, on the other hand, is a different story. Even though they only drive at low speeds, they get hurt really badly even in minor accidents because they don’t wear protective clothing.
Yes, motorcycling is dangerous, but your clothes make a huge difference.
I agree. I have been in a pretty serious motorcycle "accident". Broke my wrist and banged up my ankle pretty bad. Full helmet (with a big scrape on it where I hit the ground), leather jacket (again, nice scrape on the back), jeans, and high boots. Glad I was wearing them. But I have ridden without a helmet (legal in NM at the time) a few times when the weather was right and I'm on a shortish, easy joy ride. Worth the risk for me in those few instances. It is also great to be able to give someone else a short ride on a whim and let them wear your helmet, while you go without. Not a big plus for me to live in a place where everything that the majority thinks is imprudent is illegal.
It's also a legal requirement to wear helmets when riding a pushbike too, which is something far more controversial as there's research to suggest that the effect those laws have on reducing cycling participation has a more negative impact on visibility and safety of cyclists. But I don't think I've ever heard someone say that mandatory motorbike helmet laws are a bad thing.
The problem with your presumption that authority is good, is that it assumes the authority is somehow better at making decisions for an individual than the individual is.
There is research which shows that the trend towards higher vehicular weight is caused by drivers desire to be, or at least feel, safer. Yet this makes less economically fortunate drivers less safe, has adverse impact on the environment, and doesn't improve human welfare.
Why do we regulate helmets and not vehicular weight? It might have less to do with improving welfare and more to do with individual politics. I fear people have more of a tendency to want to be an authority over personal liberties than of unwarranted aggressions. For example, how long have people protested gay relationships, but allowed sexual harassment to persist?
Having lived in both countries, Australia doesn't seem to have the inflating vehicle size problem to the same degree. Plus the attitude to welfare is very different in general. I don't think you can just transplant laws and arguments from one to the other and expect them to make sense.
Insurance is a for-profit business. It's normal for them to exclude high-risk activities from being covered by a policy that's priced for low-risk life. You can get a special GA-covering policy if you pay extra, there or elsewhere.
> [...] show that general aviation aircraft average nearly seven accidents per 100,000 flight hours, compared with an average of 0.16 accidents per 100,000 hours for commercial airlines.
So the accident rate for GA is over 40 times higher than commercial.
On top of that, around three quarters of these fatal accidents are the result of what could be broadly categorized as pilot error... Which is why the FAA has such a stick up its butt about the licensing status of the TapJets pilots.
Or, to express it more charitably - we're all used to it. Car-related fatalities no longer register as unusual. You don't hear much about them in the news. They're treated as "something that unavoidably happens to people". Like cancer or heart attack, and unlike murder, which is unusual. I'm willing to bet that you're friends or acquaintances with people who crashed their cars (with or without health consequences), and you're at most two hops in your social graph from people who died in a car accident.
Yup. There are hundreds of fatal plane crashes in the US every year. Mostly private pilots, a few charters and other commercial but non-scheduled flights such as medical evacuation.
People often say things like "Plane crashes are very rare" but they're (often unconsciously) conflating "Plane crash" with "Scheduled commercial aviation accident resulting in fatalities". _Plane crashes_ happen all the time, because people fly planes and people are idiots. They forget to put enough fuel in the plane, they don't check the engine works properly, they do maintenance and forget to put back important components... they lose track of where they are, they make bad decisions, they don't plan things properly in advance, they ignore warnings, it never ends.
Commercial aviation is safe _despite_ these problems, and one of the ways that's achieved is by having rules that everybody has to follow, and by incrementally improving those rules in the light of what is learned from both accidents (which are rare) and incidents short of accidents (reported anonymously to ASRS at NASA). Not following the rules to be "disruptive" will get people killed.
Aviation is a game of low margins but there's a _lot_ of training around how to handle those margins. Maximum wind speeds, maximum weight, distribution of weights, checklists for checking your engine and airframe and all that. Almost all aviation accidents are pilot error.
It isn't simply accepted wisdom or opinion. Every fatal aircraft accident is investigated by the federal government until they find a root cause (and some non-fatal accidents). They don't just blame the pilot because it's convenient to blame the dead human either. Running out of fuel ranks near the top and is easy to verify. Failure to follow procedures is often a contributing factor if not a direct cause. Approach stalls are far too common, and that's simply pilot error - sorry, there's no other way to explain that. Mechanical failures happen too and are often a result of improper maintenance.
IMHO electric planes should be more reliable and easier on the pilot, but they may never really be a thing without a major breakthrough in batteries.
According to the FAA[0], the top ten leading causes of fatal general-aviation accidents between 2001 and 2016 were
1. Loss of Control Inflight
2. Controlled Flight Into Terrain
3. System Component Failure – Powerplant
4. Fuel Related
5. Unknown or Undetermined
6. System Component Failure – Non-Powerplant
7. Unintended Flight In IMC
8. Midair Collisions Low
9. Low-Altitude Operations
10. Other
Items 5 and 10 give us no information. We can charitably let pilots off the hook on 3 and 6, but the root cause might be inadequate preflight inspection or maintenance.
The rest are clearly pilot error.
(1) Loss of control is commonly (aerodynamic) stalls that sometimes lead to spins, and a large number of those tend to occur on the same turn in the airport traffic pattern just before landing.
(2) Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) means the pilot flew the airplane right into the ground, a mountain, buildings, or water. The pilot failed to recognize or prevent an impending collision.
(4) Fuel mismanagement is one of the most preventable on the list. Take enough fuel for your mission plus the required legal reserve! Math is hard, though. If I have fifty-gallon tanks and burn 16 gallons per hour, that’s four hours of fuel. In other cases, impatience or being a cheapskate not wanting to take on fuel for a short mission is the culprit. Arrogantly proclaiming “I know this airplane” will do it too. Pilots say the only time you can have too much fuel is when you’re on fire.
(7) Unintended flight into Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC) means accidentally flying into clouds, fog, precipitation, haze, and so on. Flying in IMC requires an adequately equipped airplane (A TOMATO FLAMES plus GRABCARD[1]), an Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) clearance from Air Traffic Control (ATC), and an instrument-rated pilot with IFR currency. This means additional training, preparation, and proficiency. Without outside reference to the horizon, humans are subject to all sorts of dangerous sensory illusions. An instrument-rated pilot must navigate solely by reference to the flight instruments, not an easy skill. A study with dubious methods concluded that after unintended flight into IMC, a pilot has 178 seconds[2] to live.
(8) In Visual Meteorological Conditions (VMC, the opposite of IMC), all pilots have see-and-avoid responsibility for obstacles and other aircraft. Pilots on IFR flight plans are guaranteed ATC services. Pilots on Visual Flight Rules (VFR) flight plans may optionally obtain VFR traffic advisories, also known as flight following. When aircraft are close together, ATC will point out traffic (other aircraft), e.g., “Cessna 123AB, traffic two o’clock, five miles, six thousand, southeast bound.” A collision in IMC might be due to ATC error, namely loss of required aircraft separation, but those cases are the exception.
(9) Low-altitude operations means flying near the ground. A common example of this is crop dusters. Those guys are crazy. Hotdogging pilots buzzing their friends on the ground is a foolish example that leads to accidents. Think of YouTube videos of someone in a Cub flying low over a river with trees on either side. As you noted, this is an extremely low-margin environment. Over a congested area, pilots are required to remain at least a thousand feet above the ground, which is still extremely low. Sparsely populated areas and open water have no legal restrictions, and the rest require at least a 500-foot buffer. All of those are still extremely close to the ground and require a sharp pilot. Power lines, antennae, towers, bridges, and trees are all potentially fatal obstacles.
> better and more reliable ways to get yourself [...] killed
I think it's also one of the more expensive ways of achieving this, too. Although I'd love to see some statistics on this, using some appropriate units. Something like 'dollars per death per mile-year' maybe? Anyone have thoughts on how to source the data and/or calculate this properly?
And why do you think they are so much safer? Pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that regulations for flights and pilots are extremely stringent, while any old yokel who can fog a mirror can pass a driver's test.
Does that account for pilot involvement (properly certified pilots will avoid dangerous situations more often than car drivers _because_ the requirements are much higher, and will get out of potentially dangerous situations when they arise)?
> I can largely agree that most humans can drive a car.
This is a society level agreement I am absolutely baffled by. Most people can't or at least not well and there are not studies I know into this. Reflexes, decision making processes etc are all lacking in case something bad happens.
Edit: thanks for the swift, numerous downvotes! Care to link a few studies so I can learn more where I am wrong?
I didn't downvote but I assume it's because you made IMO a pretty ridiculous, or at least completely unactionable statement. Life, including modern life, is all about balancing costs and benefits. One of the benefits (for most people) of modern life is that you can hop in a car and drive places. A strict training and licensing regime along with other rules and regulations similar to those that apply to pilots, especially commercial and military ones, is incompatible with that benefit. There are various laws and rules but they're deliberately set at a "most adults can drive" level.
You may not like that tradeoff but most people disagree.
> A strict training and licensing regime along with other rules and regulations similar to those that apply to pilots, especially commercial and military ones, is incompatible with that benefit.
The full set of regulations maybe, but I believe you could retain the "most adults can drive" level while making everyone go through much stricter training and licensing regime. Right now in Europe and US, the required training and examinations are ridiculously weak (amounts to basically explaining the UI of the car and going over the basic maneuvers until the point you no longer spectacularly fail at them). It only shows that as a society, we never grew the required respect for the driving. I think it's because back when the expectations set, there were much less cars on the road.
I'm sorry but you're an idiot. If you haven't got a license to drive a car you shouldn't be driving on the road without close supervision by qualified driver, much less taking paying passengers.
Qualified drivers are dangerous. Unqualified unsupervised drivers are a lethality to everyone.
Yes, though in some cases the safety is only marketing fluff and cutting corners actually doesn’t contribute to any reduction in safety.
A safety arbitrage play means a company is attempting to turn a profit by selling a cheaper asset deemed unsafe at the same price as a safe one or a bit less.
If the unsafe asset is actually as 100% safe as the safe one, then they have played a valid arbitrage.
If the unsafe asset however is actually unsafe, then they are running a scam.
It’s a pretty common play in some developing economies.
If 10 firms start out, and 1 survives to profitability, that single firm's P/L will show gains, but the industry net won't.
That's not true profit, but a probabilistic artefact of essentially winning a sequence of bets.
There may also be gains possible if the survivor can increase scale of operations and/or start mitigating risks that smaller players cannot. This is another path to monopoly advantage that is based, again, on effectively winning early chance-based trials, and then ratcheting in an ever-larger risk advantage as compared to smaller players.
Not sure about airplanes, but Uber does similar by arbitraging all the existing taxi regulations on safety and security. They do so in the name of the almighty dollar.
I have a friend who was a driver for Uber, and they got in a wreck. Surprise, since it was a commercial drive (got paid) their personal insurance didn't cover anything. Uber has left them hanging with their promise that they'd fix it up in smoke. The insult to injury was that insurance was legally obligated to report to the state that they were "driving with no insurance". Yeah, fun.
If you drive for Uber/Lyft and use personal insurance, you are in actuality likely running with no insurance if you're being paid for the trip.
Likely, this 'nonprofit' or whatever they're trying to claim was trying to be "Ubercab of the Air". And the FAA is rightly in smacking them down quick. We don't need "$89 trips across the country" that include the fact that 'whoops, we lost 2 airplanes in the Atlantic, and sry, no insurance, too bad so sad'.
That depends on if actual safety is in jeopardy or "safety" regulations that are often written for the expressed purpose to increase costs in order to be anti-competitive with no real safety impact
No matter how misguided I may think your comment is, I think we can both agree that even in your view of it having registered aircrafts and especially having properly trained crew is in the "actual safety" category.
We all seem to agree that regulatory capture[0] exists too.
A properly trained crew sounds great, but then comes the question of definitions. Less than five years ago[1], it was legal for a first officer in an FAA Part 121 operation to hold no more than a commercial ticket, minimum aeronautical experience 250 flight hours. Airplanes were not falling out of the sky then with the now-improperly trained crews. Perhaps more flight hours were necessary, but the bar for properly trained crew may really lie at 300, 500, or a thousand hours rather than 1,500.
Maybe number of flight hours like KSLOC is not such a useful metric. Current ATP minimums may nail it exactly. How shall we verify the answer?
It's the next step in airline unbundling: Pay extra for a seatbelt! For a floatation device! And take the business-class flights that features actual trained pilots!
You may say this in jest, but RyanAir actually applied for permission to do flights with unseated passengers. Fortunately, we still have an aviation authority (in Norway) wise enough to throw it out, sneering.
They haven't. It's a marketing ploy: throw some crap as PR and see where it sticks
Keeps them on the news as the "thinking of how to make stuff cheaper". Note how this has toned down in the past year or so, because the "as cheap as possible" thing was backfiring on them
Founders being idiots. We all have a duty to call this abhorrent behavior out, and say that not only is it NOT ok from a consumer standpoint, but also that any business that uses such tactics to get ahead deserves to fail.
This was absolutely unsafe and illegal. Regardless of whether they were conducting a flight for friends or not, they were operating an aircraft that requires two pilots at all times (per the FAA) with just one pilot (and a student pilot).
That's unsafe and illegal, even if the plane was otherwise empty. Even worse with passengers.
"Move fast and break things" is a bad strategy if you're operating in the sky. We've been accumulating data that support this view since Wilbur and Orville in 1903.
We're a little too proud of "break things" sometimes. "Break things" should not extend to human beings, or fragile aluminium tubes containing human beings.
You wouldn't accept "move fast and break things" from your surgeon, and he can only kill one customer at a time.
The FAA has actively worked to assist and promote general aviation, air taxis, and charters for a long time. All of those compete to some extent against commercial airlines.
According to TapJets' response, these were unpaid test flights undertaken for friends and family during development of the app to test it. And it's a side of their business they don't engage in anymore, acting more as an Uber/Airbnb matching agent:
https://www.tapjets.com/Home/Article/tapjets-answers-recent-...
Oh I know. I noticed and thought the same. Just thought it would be helpful to have the company's response for context. When I read the FAA release, it sounded like they were forcing TapJets to shut down, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
The FAA can't stop you from being a business, since that's not their charter. They can stop you from conducting air flights in the USA.
As an extreme thought experiment, the FAA could revoke Delta Airlines' authorization to fly, but Delta would continue to be a company- just without any way to make money.
Sure, that's basically what they laid out in their response. It's up to the owner/operators of each individual jet to make sure that they are flying legally. TapJets can continue to match up passengers with jets.
On a separate issue, but one I hope TapJets has considered, is helping jet owners maintain rules compliance. TapJets is going to start catching heat if they match up flights with private jets that don't meet part 135 charter requirements. The number of charter flights that TapJets matches is small enough that if the FAA wants to, they can send a representative to every single flight and ramp check the pilots and planes for compliance. If they start doing that the supply of flights on TapJets will go down because jet owners don't want to be grounded.
> If the law is broken, fix it? The whole "spirit of the law" thing is what leads us to political attacks being made with laws.
Reality doesn't work that way. In fact, the whole reason for the ballooning of regulations everywhere is an attempt to make things more about "the letter" than "the spirit".
Reality is fucking complicated, as every programmer who ever tried to model or simulate anything from real life should know (and if one didn't have that experience, I recommend reading [0], recently discussed on HN). "Letter of law" is like code - in attempt to capture all the relevant details, it gets fractal in handling corner cases to corner cases. But, the best thing about humans is that our intelligence allows us to comprehend the intent behind something even without understanding all the relevant details and corner cases. This is what "spirit of law" exploits, and why it's a great tool at reducing complexity.
Having everything run on "letter of law" is practically impossible today, and would definitely not be practically usable with laws in textual form.
(This is, incidentally, why "smart contracts as laws" are stupid - computers can't understand intent, so you're enshrining some hard rules that will always be buggy and full of loopholes.)
If TapJets was willing to do illegal and unsafe stuff with their own family and friends, think how much more likely they are to skirt safety regulations when providing services to strangers.
It's more an argument of whether the flights are considered commercial or private. If the flights in question are judged to be private, they may not have skirted any safety regulations at all.
For example, on a private flight (and on some commercial ones) a co-pilot is not required. The student pilot in the right seat might as well be a passenger.
It seems like TapJats is attempting to use "private flights" to skirt commercial flight regulations (and the safety requirements that tag along). If this turns out to be true, they should be crucified.
Pilots without the required training will fly shotgun (and then low and behold, be required to assume control in a situation that requires it, exceeding their authority), pilots will scud run, or pilots will make other unsafe decisions due to a lack of training, and people will die.
EDIT: I'm mistaken if their website copy is accurate:
"Our partners require their captains to hold Airline Transport Certification and have thousands of flight hours before joining the flight team. First officers are required to have more initial hours than prescribed by regulation, and they are paired with experienced captains to ensure each of your aircraft is piloted by the best at all times. Pilots also undergo rigorous, airline-quality training conducted by Flight Safety International every six months, and Federal Aviation Administration-approved Check Airmen conduct line checks on each of our captains and first officers on a regular basis."
It actually does make a difference. The main difference between a Private Pilots License (PPL) and a Commercial Pilots License (CPL) is that you cannot fly customers for profit on a PPL (but you can fly people as favors and be reimbursed for expenses).
Its hard to tell just how serious these accusations are. For instance
>the airman who served as second-in-command only had a student pilot certificate
Presumably the first in command did have a full certificate (otherwise why wouldn't they mention it). The reality of this could be as mundane as "the guy sitting shotgun in the Cessna is only half way to his PPL and we bought a friend along".
Legally Tapjet may squeak by if their counterarguments are legitimate. At the very least fully rescinding their license may be overkill. This decision might be politically targeted at anyone trying to be Uber of the skies. I'd want to see more than this one off press release before calling them reckless.
The problem with your comment is that you are wrong in your interpretation. Your interpretation is that it's black and white on what the FAA can do. There's famous saying among pilots when doing something that isn't explicit in FARs. "That sounds like a grey area". For a conservative pilot, they'll never do it because it could be a license suspension or at minimum dialing a number to talk to an FAA investigator. To a more liberal or adventurous pilot, they might bend the limit and see if it comes up.
I am curious if you're a pilot and if so have your CPL or ATP.
It's not about the PPL vs. CPL (and by definition they need more than a CPL). The difference is in what might be considered "compensation". The FAA's interpretation of this is so incredibly broad, it should scare the pants off anyone considering bending the rules here, and their lawyers should have picked up on this. Did the flights with vendors increase a relationship that might further an interest or negotation later? Did the flights help them improve their app? Did it result in a prospect of a return favor?
It may not be fair or just, but the FAA put those rules out there and a whole lot of people have been inconvenienced by them. I love that Tapjets is doing this, but they moved fast and not particularly wisely. If they thought they could run like Uber and ask for forgiveness later, they never worked with the FAA.
>It actually does make a difference. The main difference between a Private Pilots License (PPL) and a Commercial Pilots License (CPL) is that you cannot fly customers for profit on a PPL (but you can fly people as favors and be reimbursed for expenses).
Not exactly. Under 14 CFR 61.113(c) carrying a passenger as a PPL requires a bona fide common purpose (c.f. MacPherson-Winton interpretation) — you can't just go on a flight because they need to go there and you owe them a favor. Uber-style ridesharing has already been thoroughly rebuked by the FAA after two companies (Airpooler and Flytenow (YC S14)) attempted it, even if the pilot is only being reimbursed their pro rata share, under the justification that pilots cannot be holding out publicly for passengers on a flight they intend to take. It went all the way up to certiorari being denied by the Supreme Court in Flytenow v. FAA.
The FAA action this week makes it clear that Tapjet's flights were under Part 135, not Part 91. Flying a student pilot as SIC is in gross violation of the FARs.
Part 135 vs Part 91 is exactly the issue. They thought they were complying with Part 91, those are reasonable rules to run your test flights under I think?
If they were flying their 'friends and family' all about in 2016-17 in response to bookings on their app without bona fide reasons to go to those places (not least with a student pilot as SIC on business jets), then that's an emphatic yes. The FAA made it quite clear well before then that such flights cannot qualify under Part 91.
It is not correct that a private pilot can be reimbursed for expenses. Pilots are permitted to share expenses for a common purpose.
The long standing (~30 years) rule is the pilot's share can't be less than their proportionally equal share, based on the total number of people in the aircraft. The pilot can't walk away from a private flight with a net $0 cost or it isn't really a private flight, the pilot is being compensated. And the passengers and the pilot need to be engaged in a common purpose activity, ergo it cannot just be about transporting people from A to B if the pilot has no need himself to go from point A to point B.
If the purpose of the flight is to test an app for the company, it is unquestionably a commercial flight and the pilots are employees for the app company. Depending on myriad other factors, the size of the aircraft and how many passengers are on board, a two pilot crew rule might apply and if so absolutely a student pilot does not qualify.
>> ergo it cannot just be about transporting people from A to B if the pilot has no need himself to go from point A to point B.
Is that true even if there is no money involved? If your friend needs a ride from A to B and you were looking for an excuse to go flying that should be alright assuming you're not compensated for it. Or is that not right? Your parents are in another state and want to come visit, so you go pick them up via plane. That's certainly alright. I've never heard of it being an issue unless money was involved or a business trip.
Pretty much it's about sharing expenses. But if I go by myself from A to B, neither expense sharing or common purpose applies. But then B to A is taking my mom/friend as well as myself back home. So that voyage is common purpose and if there are two people the cost of that direction can be split 50/50 (or I can pay a bigger share, I just can't pay less).
The rules on reimbursement are a reasonable accommodation that TapJets is trying to exploit to do an end-run around regulations that exist primarily for safety reasons. When an entity attempts such a move, the FAA may reasonably enforce the letter of the law, and even adjust the regulations, to preserve safety - in fact, it has an obligation to do so.
And there is more to safety than faa regs. Airlines, those running lots of planes, have other safety advantages that individual taircraft/pilots do not. They will not have institutional knowledge nor the programs common within larger organizations. We shouldnt pretend that solo operators can be as safe as the big guys.
No, they claim they were operating under Part 91 (non-commercial) rules since they didn't take money for the flights. Part 91 rules are less strict, in particular they don't require a commercial license.
I'm not sure which jets they were flying, but most business jets have a two person crew requirement, and a student pilot would not meet the crew requirements. It doesn't sound like their short response completely covers the FAA's allegations, but getting the flights to be considered Part 91 would be a big piece of it.
Not exactly, and the TapJets response doesn't fully lay out that they met all the requirements for Part 91 flying, but they mentioned non-paying passengers.
You can fly under part 91 rules commercially but there are restrictions on how you can operate. You can operate under part 91 rules non-commercially, like I do, and that basically means that my passengers can only pay for their fair share of the gas burned. I can't make any profit. If the trip only burns 20 gallons I can't ask them to pay to fill up my tanks (51 gallons). But I can let them buy me a hamburger, as long as that's something they would have done anyway if I didn't take them flying.
Every flight under part 135 is considered "commercial," meaning that pilots must have a commercial rating as well as numerous other requirements like extra maintenance, inspections, and record keeping. Even if there are no paying passengers, a flight might still be under part 135 rules, but I'm not sure about the specifics.
I believe it's legal (but I'm not a lawyer) for a plane that flies under part 135 rules one day to be operated under part 91 rules the next day. Imagine flying a chartered flight under part 135 rules to Los Angeles. While on the ramp, the 100-hour inspection comes due, but the plane is still current with it's annual inspection. The owner of the jet would still be allowed to use it under part 91 rules, but it would not be allowed to conduct another charter flight until it passed the 100-hour inspection.
Just to address the Part 91 vs 135 for commercial flight: it is legal provided there are no revenue generating cargo or passengers aboard (e.g., zero people and a couple of lost bags = nope, because bags are freight).
The carriers commonly make use of Part 91 for reposition flights to move equipment into place to resume original schedules following weather diversions or whatnot.
There are commercial operations under Part 91, and they require a commercial license. Air tours and corporate flying where the airplane is owned by the company are in there, for example. I've done them both.
You're right that there are commercial flights that fall under part 91 rules. However in this case I think TapJets response was trying to say that their pilot didn't require a commercial rating, which would answer the FAA's claim of "a commercial pilot certificate was required."
I bet the flights will be considered to have been under 91 (don’t see how it would be 135 or 121). I also think it won’t help them at all because these are commercial flights either way.
You seem to be both speaking with authority and saying the opposite of what I’d expect here. What’s your background in aviation law?
I have no backround in aviation law, just aviation. I’m a private pilot, my dad is a commercial pilot, and my cousin works for a charter jet company. I work with several pilots, and a few previous coworkers have retired from the USAF and fly for the airlines. We have arguments about the rules all the time. We pull out the FARs all the time just to win.
My interpretation of the TapJets response wasn’t that they were saying that the pilots had commercial ratings, it’s that they were saying that they didn’t need one, i.e., it was a non-commercial flight. TapJets doesn’t give any details, and neither does the FAA. But flying a light jet non-commercially can happen, so it’s not like TapJets is obviously in the wrong. Several celebrities own and pilot their own jets without commercial ratings.
I think in the end the FAA will stick with their ruling, I doubt they would issue an emergency revocation if they were on the fence.
No, I’m interpreting what TapJets said in their response. I’m sure the FAA has some solid evidence and they get to make and interpret the rules. But here’s what we have as public knowledge.
FAA: You flew flights with unqualified pilots and with private ratings.
TapJets: All our flights were legal under FAR Part 91.501.
They didn’t dispute that the flights happened, and they didn’t dispute that they had passengers. They didn’t claim that the pilots did have commercial ratings. Thus, they must be claiming that they viewed the flights as non-commercial.
“Hire a private plane fast and for good price with the help of Tapjet! Best pilots, best quality, safety . We offer best price for private plane rental!”
What that certificate attests is that the airline has appropriate infrastructure in place to operate the specific aircraft type(s) safely. That means appropriately trained and qualified technicians to maintain the aircraft, a proper supply chain to procurement airworthy spare parts, properly trained aircrew, etc.
Operating aircraft isn't like web development where you can just push a buggy pile of JavaScript and fix it a few weeks later. We're talking about people's lives. This stuff has to work.
It's the distinction between private and commercial that doesn't make sense to me. If I want to fly from A to B, whether I get paid or not doesn't make a difference to the safety of the passengers. If I have a private pilot cert, I am qualified to fly the aircraft safely.
Commercial aviation has more regulations and procedures around it, and stricter standards. As a consequence, flying on a commercial plane is orders of magnitude safer than flying on private plane.
There is an extreme difference in the number of hours and required training between your SPL/PPL/CPL/ATPL. Eg: For fixed wing, you can get your PPL within 35 flight hours at a Part 141 School. Your ATP comes at a minimum of 1500 hours, and you are required to know much more about emergency recovery. The regs in place regarding minimum requirements for carrying passengers and performing commercial ops are there for very good reason. Even when having your PPL(or other license for that fact), there are currency requirements on when you are allowed to carry passengers on Part 91 non-commercial flights.
In the aviation world, even having your commercial is considered a "license to learn". Having your PPL simply implies that you can fly an aircraft in good weather conditions, should have the better judgement not to fly beyond your weather minimums, and have the ability not to kill anyone outside of your aircraft should conditions deteriorate while in the air. Even with my fixed wing PPL, I am extremely cautious with passengers knowing that I don't have nearly as much knowledge and experience as someone with their CPL/ATPL.
While I can't claim to be an expert in _why_ the FAA chose to structure the regs the way they do, I have some personal thoughts on the matter. dweekly has a great comment explaining Part 91, 135, and 121 operation rules that I'll reference here.
A Part 91 flight conducted by a PPL with passengers certainly isn't the safest activity the pilot or passengers could partake in. But its certainly enjoyable. Let's take a similar example. A hobbyist motorcycle racer owns a private track, and a friend wants a joy-ride. Similarly to a passenger on a Part 91 flight, a passenger on a high speed sports bike is at higher risk of fatality than a person who decided to spend the day relaxing at the beach. But doing so on private property with little/no risk to non-participants is not illegal. Many/Most high-risk activities are not illegal provided that the risk is only to the willing participants. While I can't be sure that's the reason the FAA allows low-hour non-CPL pilots to carry passengers, I would imagine it is a large contributing factor considering the statistical probability of fatality is with the pilot and passengers, not people in other planes or on the ground (to the best of my knowledge).
Part 135 and 121 operations have the license requirements such that people purchasing services have a reasonable expectation that the pilots involved have been properly trained, and are VERY safe.
Now to the kicker. Why are private pilots not allowed to accept ANY compensation? Really, NO COMPENSATION. Although I haven't personally heard of anyone getting their license revoked for something as little as paying the full cost of expenses, it is against the regulations for your passengers to pay more than half the pro-rata share of expenses (rent, fuel, etc...). This is a hotly debated item, that no one seems to have a good answer for. The most convinving argument I've heard is that it goes back to the late '20s when the regs for commercial pilots started going into place. The history around this is shaky, but supposedly the commercial license came about as a way to track interstate and foreign commerce. Supposedly the government at the time was scared of the ability to circumvent taxes since they couldn't as easily stop and check trucks or trains crossing borders. So they created the commercial license as a way of regulating inter-border trade to trusted pilots. I don't have a source on that unfortunately - more of an oral tradition story. But it makes the most sense to me of everything I've heard.
Another rabbit-hole I won't go too deep into is the issue of insurance. Getting insurance on an aircraft is much more expensive if it will be used for compensation purposes (Part 135 or 121). Even if a private pilot were able to get compensation from passengers or for cargo, the insurance rate would be astronomical(as a commercial rotor wing pilot, I can't find a job doing anything but instructing until I hit ~1000 hours due to insurance rates, if an insurance company would even let me fly on a commercial bird before then). And if you got in an accident while providing paid-for services without proper (for comp)insurance, it would not pay-out anything.
tl;dr You can have PPL w/ passengers because you're mostly only endangering yourself and willing passengers. Commercial operations are limited to using CPL/ATPL pilots such that consumers have a reasonable guarantee of safety. And nobody knows why private pilots can't be compensated (although if someone has a source with concrete answer I would love to hear it). Even if they could legally, they financially couldn't due to insurance costs.
The PPL is about 40 - 60 hours of experience at the time of rating, and CPL is 200+ hours. New PPL holders do not have an IFR endorsement, while most CPLs do. So the qualifications are vastly different.
In the industry, we say that a PPL is "a license to learn."
I read both press releases and the missing info is which aircraft were being used with the unrated pilots. If it was a plane requiring a SIC, and the second pilot was a student, then that was the real reason for the revocation.
Also, the catchall "recklessness" can be used at any time. Flying pax without a rated SIC would be an easy complaint to win.
Aside from what others have mentioned, yes just the fact that you're getting paid makes a difference to the safety of the passengers.
If you and your three friends have agreed to split the cost of a joyride on the weekend in your Cessna and there's an unexpected storm, you're much more likely to just cancel. You're all going for fun, nobody wants to fly in bad weather, and you can just go on some other weekend.
Consider the same example where you have three paying customers who've you've agreed to fly around on the weekend. Now you'll be in a situation of having to refund tickets to disappointed customers. You might decide to go ahead with it anyway. Now you're putting members of the public at more risk for your own monetary interest.
If I were tapjets, I would probably not want my legal counsel saying that tapjets is like airbnb and uber. 2 companies which continue to operate in sometimes murky legal areas.
" Just like Uber, Airbnb, and other successful companies that changed the status-quo, TapJets Inc. is now facing push-back by government regulators," said Debra Fein, Corporate Counsel for TapJets, " TapJets denies any wrongdoing, denies all allegations that FAA has made, and is prepared to vigorously defend itself against allegations despite it no longer being the need for TapJets to be a certified airline."
I find this to be a good litmus test. If someone takes pride in calling themselves "like Uber, AirBnB", then I personally will not do business with them. Both companies are primarily known for exploiting and breaking laws for a quick buck, and Uber in particular is also widely recognized as run by a bunch of antisocial assholes.
It's doubly stupid to call yourself that when you're responsible for the very lives of your customers, like in this case...
There is no safety concern here, it's purely bureaucratic and political. Many GA planes are 100% legal and safe to be flown with one pilot. The question here is whether or not this was a commercial (part 91) operation or a charter (part 135) operation. If passengers (friends and family) were not paying, it seems sensible to treat this like any other general aviation (private) flight, but the FAA is notorious for not being particularly sensible. If there's even a remote opportunity to pursue legal action, the FAA will do so.
What's problematic here (and with many FAA cases) is the total lack of due process. The TapJets case hasn't even gone to court and the FAA has already punished them and issued a public statement before TapJets was even able to argue their case. They are guilty until proven innocent.
The "emergency order" used here is intended for actual emergencies, such as if a carrier was flying planes that weren't physically safe. A dispute over whether compensation occurred over a year ago is not an emergency and the use of such an order seems like an abuse of power.
Note: for all flights with paying customers (not friends and family) TapJets states that they operate according to the rules of any other air charter under part 135.
Pilot here. The FAA is overly bureaucratic in some ways, but the safety record of modern commercial air travel is incredible, and that bureaucracy is partly responsible.
More to the point, there’s not enough information here to assess whether the FAA is overreacting, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt over an anonymous, newly-registered probable-sockpuppet account any day.
> Thanks for your response but my tenure on hn is probably the least relevant part of the discussion.
Using the word 'sock puppet' implies that you are speaking for someone else and that you might have a hidden agenda. Thus, your tenure on HN is indeed relevant in this case.
I'm long time HN news lurker and student pilot. My only conflict of interest is that I find the FAA a pain in the ass (and seeing this article encouraged me to finally post something).
I didn't even know about TapJets until yesterday but find it amusing that people think I'm a sockpuppet.
Does US airspace have a good safety record? Yes. Is that mutually exclusive from the FAA overreacting? No.
I think they 100% should be investigated but unless something legitimately risky is happening then I really just have to roll my eyes at this emergency order. FAA policy is heavily influenced by airlines so it would be unsurprising if this was more politically motivated than anything, but until I hear more specifics about the models of plane used I'll wait and see.
People have a right to create accounts to join in on discussion here without being accused of sinister shillage—the tiredest internet trope of them all. Pulling such accusations out of thin air (let alone some more internal place) is absolutely not ok here.
> an anonymous, newly-registered probable-sockpuppet account any day
Attacking another user like that is explicitly against HN's rules, and we ban accounts that do it. What kind of community are we if we insult new commenters just because we don't agree with what they say? Please don't do it again.
Let's see. 2017 was the fourth year in a row in which the US had 0 fatalities in commercial airline accidents. Seems like the FAA gets the benefit of the doubt here.
A few thoughts here, responding to a comment where nearly all of the facts stated are wrong and/or ignorant.
Caveat 1: I'm not an aviation lawyer, or indeed licensed to practice law of any kind. Caveat 2: I am a licensed rotorcraft PPL, certified to fly helicopters non-commercially so I have a marginal amount of study of the FAR/AIM.
Now, some background. There are three primary ways to accomplish a flight:
A) Part 91 of the FAR covers non-commercial flights. This includes pleasure flights, such as private aviation, and flight schools. Unless a friend is giving you a ride in their plane (in which case you're only allowed legally to pay your pro-rata portion of flight costs) or if you're a student pilot (in which case your co-pilot must be performing flight instruction and be a Certified Flight Instructor with their Commercial license) you probably have never flown a Part 91 flight. There's really no way that TapJets could have been operating under Part 91: it's not a flight school and it is being run as a commercial operation.
B) Part 135 (not "part 131" in parent comment) covers air taxi / charter operations that are performed on an ad-hoc / on-demand basis. The bar for such flights is much higher than Part 91 flights. Pilots must not only have their commercial certification (250 hours of flight experience for fixed-wing) but also are subject to further training and the craft and overall operations are subject to a higher bar of scrutiny. This is sane: if you pay a commercial provider to ferry you from one place to the next, you have a reasonable expectation of safety.
C) Part 121 "air carrier" operations with regularly scheduled commercial flights. If you've purchased a plane ticket on a carrier (think: United, Delta, American, Southwest, etc) the flight you were on was almost certainly a Part 121 flight. These flights are subject to the highest scrutiny since they have the highest assumed customer safety. Pilots are held to an incredibly high bar, the Airline Transport Pilot level of certification, requiring a minimum of 1500 hours of flight experience. This also makes sense: if you're buying a regular plane ticket on, say, Hipmunk, your assumption is that your flight will be professionally and safely flown.
Now to address the specific commentary:
1) That's correct that if a private pilot is flying their friends and family who are not paying anything for a flight, that is a lawful Part 91 flight. I'm 99% confident this is not the service TapJets is offering.
2) Most commercial planes are not currently certified for single-pilot operations. There has been specific successful effort to do so for Very Light Jets but I would be surprised if TapJets was flying any Single-Pilot IFR certified aircraft. (Happy to learn more here if this guess is wrong.)
3) The FAA's legal jurisdiction is to secure and make safe the navigable airspace of the United States of America. They have full regulatory jurisdiction to make calls on what constitutes safe flight or not and to enforce such rules, as provided by Congress. They are not required to first successfully pursue a civil or criminal trial against an individual or organization in order to enforce regulatory code. In this case it would appear that a Part 135 licensed operator was performing flights outside of Part 135 requirements and has had their Part 135 certification revoked. TapJets "stating" that they conform to Part 135 is not sufficient; the FAA appears to have solid evidence that they have not.
For better or for worse, flight operations in the US are considered a privilege and not a right and Congress has given the FAA permission to regulate things that fly in the navigable airspace. (See US v Causby to begin going down a rabbit hole of the still not-very-well-defined notion of what constitutes "navigable airspace" but it certainly extends at least from 400 feet above ground everywhere over US territory to th...
> I see your point but a perfect safety record doesn't preclude overreacting to fairly minor infractions.
But is it overreacting?
All systems of regulations are imperfect, but FAA regulations are the product of decades of work by very, very smart people. As a whole, FAA regulations are hugely concerned with what seem like 'minor infractions' because 'minor infractions' are often enough to start a chain of events that leads to major accidents. This is especially true as experience increases because experienced people are so much less likely to make major mistakes that they have to be concerned with the small chinks in the armor of safety.
If they were flying planes not certified for single pilot operation, I'd completely agree with you. However that would be problematic under both part 91 and part 135. If their actions were completely legal under part 91 and friends/family were not compensating them, I take serious issue with treating the test flights like a 135 operation.
The FAA does have very smart individuals, but they are also heavily lobbied by airlines and are subject to conflicts of interest just like cities with Uber/Lyft.
> The TapJets case hasn't even gone to court and the FAA has already punished them and issued a public statement before TapJets was even able to argue their case. They are guilty until proven innocent.
They are the regulator. They have the power to put in place temporary measures. Much like police can confiscate your driving license.
Sorry but I don't want my house squashed by a TapJet plane because the pilot got ill and the student pilot had no clue how to land the plane.
I hate to break it to you, but many planes are flown by one pilot- Even some small jets are certified for this and it happens all the time... Possibly above your house.
TapJets was just being incredibly stupid here. Pilots and airlines know the regulations and know if they mess with them they’ll get hit hard.
Anyone that knows anything about aviation is just rolling their eyes at TapJet and saying good riddence. The “Uber” model of just blatantly ignoring regulations to get a leg up doesn’t work in aviation. While pilots and airlines aren’t exactly fans of the FAA, most would say that on the whole the system works well—and in both general aviation and our ATC system the US is the envy of the aviation world.
TapJet isn’t the first, but hopefully the last, startup to try such shenanigans.
173 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadSome answers to the question "Difference between CPL and ATPL":
- https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-CPL-and...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/18vzuj/can_someone_...
- https://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-168050.html
It’s a perfectly fine hobby if you respect it, and there’s no sense discouraging otherwise qualified folks from flying. GA is already in severe decline.
I think when GP wrote "commercial airliners are safe... small private craft, not as much", they meant it from the POV of a passenger.
I don’t have a source at hand, but IIRC flying a private plane is one of the better and more reliable ways to get yourself hurt or killed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/opinion/The-Dangers-of-Pr...
"The National Transportation Safety Board found that in 2011, 94 percent of fatal aviation accidents occurred in what’s called general aviation. That category includes private small planes flown by amateurs as well as professionally piloted corporate flights in high-powered aircraft, such as the Gulfstream IV jet that crashed in May in Bedford, Mass., killing all seven people on board. By contrast, commercial aviation had no fatal accidents that year. Statistics from the N.T.S.B. show that general aviation aircraft average nearly seven accidents per 100,000 flight hours, compared with an average of 0.16 accidents per 100,000 hours for commercial airlines."
Emphasis mine.
I've see motorcycles without helmet last time I was down south in the fall and it scares the absolute beejesus bonkers out of me :/
(I've been riding for a decade, do occasional dirt trails, and have doing motorsport rallying a while back, but never enough of a daredevil to mount a bike without helmet and armour)
In the past there was pressure from the federal government on state governments to enact more universal laws about wearing helmets. Now many states only require that young riders wear helmets and a handful don't have any rule. Here is an overview with a map, too: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/laws/helmetuse/mapmotorcycle...
It varies by state; this is one of those occasions where the federal government leaves it up to each state to mandate as they please. You might be surprised to learn that Georgia, a deeply Republican (i.e. anti-regulation) state, has strict requirements for motorcycle safety including mandatory helmets for any vehicle classed as a motorcycle.
Also, motorcycles without helmets!?!?!?!?!?!?!? America, I presume?
Commuting on a motorcycle, you should wear a helmet. Pleasure ride on the weekends, maybe not. Let the person make the decision. Seems good to me. America.
* Helmets saved an estimated 1,772 lives in 2015.
* If all motorcyclists would have worn helmets in 2015, 740 more could have been saved.
* Helmets reduce the risk of death by 37%.
* Helmets reduce the risk of head injury by 69%
https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/mc/index.html
Wear your helmet. Do it for yourself and your family, and never tell anyone NOT to wear a helmet. Seriously!
Just because one wants to enjoy a risky activity doesn't mean one has no common sense or self-preservation instinct.
I wouldn't smoke, ride without a helmet, etc, but who am I to say you are wrong for doing so? There are many people who would not sign up for a trip to Mars, but I would. Who are they to tell me I am wrong for a wanting this?
Wait, when did I accuse anyone of insanity?
> "I wouldn't smoke, ride without a helmet, etc, but who am I to say you are wrong for doing so?"
I never said anyone was wrong for anything. I think you meant to reply to person I replied to above; you and I seem to agree more or less.
Kids driving on mopeds, on the other hand, is a different story. Even though they only drive at low speeds, they get hurt really badly even in minor accidents because they don’t wear protective clothing.
Yes, motorcycling is dangerous, but your clothes make a huge difference.
As a former and future rider, I always wear a full helmet, but people have the legal right to ride without one.
If we were going for maximum safety for transportation, uncaged motor transport would be prohibited.
It's also a legal requirement to wear helmets when riding a pushbike too, which is something far more controversial as there's research to suggest that the effect those laws have on reducing cycling participation has a more negative impact on visibility and safety of cyclists. But I don't think I've ever heard someone say that mandatory motorbike helmet laws are a bad thing.
There is research which shows that the trend towards higher vehicular weight is caused by drivers desire to be, or at least feel, safer. Yet this makes less economically fortunate drivers less safe, has adverse impact on the environment, and doesn't improve human welfare.
Why do we regulate helmets and not vehicular weight? It might have less to do with improving welfare and more to do with individual politics. I fear people have more of a tendency to want to be an authority over personal liberties than of unwarranted aggressions. For example, how long have people protested gay relationships, but allowed sexual harassment to persist?
...which people in general seem to have no particular fear of.
> [...] show that general aviation aircraft average nearly seven accidents per 100,000 flight hours, compared with an average of 0.16 accidents per 100,000 hours for commercial airlines.
So the accident rate for GA is over 40 times higher than commercial.
On top of that, around three quarters of these fatal accidents are the result of what could be broadly categorized as pilot error... Which is why the FAA has such a stick up its butt about the licensing status of the TapJets pilots.
Plane accidents are much more likely to result in fatalities
Or, to express it more charitably - we're all used to it. Car-related fatalities no longer register as unusual. You don't hear much about them in the news. They're treated as "something that unavoidably happens to people". Like cancer or heart attack, and unlike murder, which is unusual. I'm willing to bet that you're friends or acquaintances with people who crashed their cars (with or without health consequences), and you're at most two hops in your social graph from people who died in a car accident.
People often say things like "Plane crashes are very rare" but they're (often unconsciously) conflating "Plane crash" with "Scheduled commercial aviation accident resulting in fatalities". _Plane crashes_ happen all the time, because people fly planes and people are idiots. They forget to put enough fuel in the plane, they don't check the engine works properly, they do maintenance and forget to put back important components... they lose track of where they are, they make bad decisions, they don't plan things properly in advance, they ignore warnings, it never ends.
Commercial aviation is safe _despite_ these problems, and one of the ways that's achieved is by having rules that everybody has to follow, and by incrementally improving those rules in the light of what is learned from both accidents (which are rare) and incidents short of accidents (reported anonymously to ASRS at NASA). Not following the rules to be "disruptive" will get people killed.
What i mean - is the dominant cause human error, or is it just normal, random failures paired with a low margin environment ?!
IMHO electric planes should be more reliable and easier on the pilot, but they may never really be a thing without a major breakthrough in batteries.
1. Loss of Control Inflight
2. Controlled Flight Into Terrain
3. System Component Failure – Powerplant
4. Fuel Related
5. Unknown or Undetermined
6. System Component Failure – Non-Powerplant
7. Unintended Flight In IMC
8. Midair Collisions Low
9. Low-Altitude Operations
10. Other
Items 5 and 10 give us no information. We can charitably let pilots off the hook on 3 and 6, but the root cause might be inadequate preflight inspection or maintenance.
The rest are clearly pilot error.
(1) Loss of control is commonly (aerodynamic) stalls that sometimes lead to spins, and a large number of those tend to occur on the same turn in the airport traffic pattern just before landing.
(2) Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) means the pilot flew the airplane right into the ground, a mountain, buildings, or water. The pilot failed to recognize or prevent an impending collision.
(4) Fuel mismanagement is one of the most preventable on the list. Take enough fuel for your mission plus the required legal reserve! Math is hard, though. If I have fifty-gallon tanks and burn 16 gallons per hour, that’s four hours of fuel. In other cases, impatience or being a cheapskate not wanting to take on fuel for a short mission is the culprit. Arrogantly proclaiming “I know this airplane” will do it too. Pilots say the only time you can have too much fuel is when you’re on fire.
(7) Unintended flight into Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC) means accidentally flying into clouds, fog, precipitation, haze, and so on. Flying in IMC requires an adequately equipped airplane (A TOMATO FLAMES plus GRABCARD[1]), an Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) clearance from Air Traffic Control (ATC), and an instrument-rated pilot with IFR currency. This means additional training, preparation, and proficiency. Without outside reference to the horizon, humans are subject to all sorts of dangerous sensory illusions. An instrument-rated pilot must navigate solely by reference to the flight instruments, not an easy skill. A study with dubious methods concluded that after unintended flight into IMC, a pilot has 178 seconds[2] to live.
(8) In Visual Meteorological Conditions (VMC, the opposite of IMC), all pilots have see-and-avoid responsibility for obstacles and other aircraft. Pilots on IFR flight plans are guaranteed ATC services. Pilots on Visual Flight Rules (VFR) flight plans may optionally obtain VFR traffic advisories, also known as flight following. When aircraft are close together, ATC will point out traffic (other aircraft), e.g., “Cessna 123AB, traffic two o’clock, five miles, six thousand, southeast bound.” A collision in IMC might be due to ATC error, namely loss of required aircraft separation, but those cases are the exception.
(9) Low-altitude operations means flying near the ground. A common example of this is crop dusters. Those guys are crazy. Hotdogging pilots buzzing their friends on the ground is a foolish example that leads to accidents. Think of YouTube videos of someone in a Cub flying low over a river with trees on either side. As you noted, this is an extremely low-margin environment. Over a congested area, pilots are required to remain at least a thousand feet above the ground, which is still extremely low. Sparsely populated areas and open water have no legal restrictions, and the rest require at least a 500-foot buffer. All of those are still extremely close to the ground and require a sharp pilot. Power lines, antennae, towers, bridges, and trees are all potentially fatal obstacles.
[0]: https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2...
[1]: http://www.askacfi.com/1651/if...
I think it's also one of the more expensive ways of achieving this, too. Although I'd love to see some statistics on this, using some appropriate units. Something like 'dollars per death per mile-year' maybe? Anyone have thoughts on how to source the data and/or calculate this properly?
This is a society level agreement I am absolutely baffled by. Most people can't or at least not well and there are not studies I know into this. Reflexes, decision making processes etc are all lacking in case something bad happens.
Edit: thanks for the swift, numerous downvotes! Care to link a few studies so I can learn more where I am wrong?
You may not like that tradeoff but most people disagree.
The full set of regulations maybe, but I believe you could retain the "most adults can drive" level while making everyone go through much stricter training and licensing regime. Right now in Europe and US, the required training and examinations are ridiculously weak (amounts to basically explaining the UI of the car and going over the basic maneuvers until the point you no longer spectacularly fail at them). It only shows that as a society, we never grew the required respect for the driving. I think it's because back when the expectations set, there were much less cars on the road.
The price we pay for that is grimly high.
You mean, someone who hasn't passed a driving test? Or someone who had their license revoked?
Qualified drivers are dangerous. Unqualified unsupervised drivers are a lethality to everyone.
A safety arbitrage play means a company is attempting to turn a profit by selling a cheaper asset deemed unsafe at the same price as a safe one or a bit less.
If the unsafe asset is actually as 100% safe as the safe one, then they have played a valid arbitrage.
If the unsafe asset however is actually unsafe, then they are running a scam.
It’s a pretty common play in some developing economies.
If 10 firms start out, and 1 survives to profitability, that single firm's P/L will show gains, but the industry net won't.
That's not true profit, but a probabilistic artefact of essentially winning a sequence of bets.
There may also be gains possible if the survivor can increase scale of operations and/or start mitigating risks that smaller players cannot. This is another path to monopoly advantage that is based, again, on effectively winning early chance-based trials, and then ratcheting in an ever-larger risk advantage as compared to smaller players.
I have a friend who was a driver for Uber, and they got in a wreck. Surprise, since it was a commercial drive (got paid) their personal insurance didn't cover anything. Uber has left them hanging with their promise that they'd fix it up in smoke. The insult to injury was that insurance was legally obligated to report to the state that they were "driving with no insurance". Yeah, fun.
If you drive for Uber/Lyft and use personal insurance, you are in actuality likely running with no insurance if you're being paid for the trip.
Likely, this 'nonprofit' or whatever they're trying to claim was trying to be "Ubercab of the Air". And the FAA is rightly in smacking them down quick. We don't need "$89 trips across the country" that include the fact that 'whoops, we lost 2 airplanes in the Atlantic, and sry, no insurance, too bad so sad'.
A properly trained crew sounds great, but then comes the question of definitions. Less than five years ago[1], it was legal for a first officer in an FAA Part 121 operation to hold no more than a commercial ticket, minimum aeronautical experience 250 flight hours. Airplanes were not falling out of the sky then with the now-improperly trained crews. Perhaps more flight hours were necessary, but the bar for properly trained crew may really lie at 300, 500, or a thousand hours rather than 1,500.
Maybe number of flight hours like KSLOC is not such a useful metric. Current ATP minimums may nail it exactly. How shall we verify the answer?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
[1]: https://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsI...
Keeps them on the news as the "thinking of how to make stuff cheaper". Note how this has toned down in the past year or so, because the "as cheap as possible" thing was backfiring on them
That's unsafe and illegal, even if the plane was otherwise empty. Even worse with passengers.
Claiming this has anything to do with "disruption to the commercial airline business" requires some extraordinary evidence to back it up.
"Move fast and break things" is a bad strategy if you're operating in the sky. We've been accumulating data that support this view since Wilbur and Orville in 1903.
You wouldn't accept "move fast and break things" from your surgeon, and he can only kill one customer at a time.
> unlicensed pilots
> unauthorized/unregistered aircraft
> cavalier attitude toward regulatory compliance
Yeah, that sounds in no way unsafe. There are rules and certification/regulation processes for a reason.
As an extreme thought experiment, the FAA could revoke Delta Airlines' authorization to fly, but Delta would continue to be a company- just without any way to make money.
On a separate issue, but one I hope TapJets has considered, is helping jet owners maintain rules compliance. TapJets is going to start catching heat if they match up flights with private jets that don't meet part 135 charter requirements. The number of charter flights that TapJets matches is small enough that if the FAA wants to, they can send a representative to every single flight and ramp check the pilots and planes for compliance. If they start doing that the supply of flights on TapJets will go down because jet owners don't want to be grounded.
If the law is broken, fix it? The whole "spirit of the law" thing is what leads us to political attacks being made with laws.
Either it's illegal, or it's not, and if we as a society should decide we want it to be, then it will be.
Reality doesn't work that way. In fact, the whole reason for the ballooning of regulations everywhere is an attempt to make things more about "the letter" than "the spirit".
Reality is fucking complicated, as every programmer who ever tried to model or simulate anything from real life should know (and if one didn't have that experience, I recommend reading [0], recently discussed on HN). "Letter of law" is like code - in attempt to capture all the relevant details, it gets fractal in handling corner cases to corner cases. But, the best thing about humans is that our intelligence allows us to comprehend the intent behind something even without understanding all the relevant details and corner cases. This is what "spirit of law" exploits, and why it's a great tool at reducing complexity.
Having everything run on "letter of law" is practically impossible today, and would definitely not be practically usable with laws in textual form.
(This is, incidentally, why "smart contracts as laws" are stupid - computers can't understand intent, so you're enshrining some hard rules that will always be buggy and full of loopholes.)
--
[0] - http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
That changes nothing, and makes it no less reckless. Airline regulations are written in blood.
For example, on a private flight (and on some commercial ones) a co-pilot is not required. The student pilot in the right seat might as well be a passenger.
Pilots without the required training will fly shotgun (and then low and behold, be required to assume control in a situation that requires it, exceeding their authority), pilots will scud run, or pilots will make other unsafe decisions due to a lack of training, and people will die.
EDIT: I'm mistaken if their website copy is accurate:
"Our partners require their captains to hold Airline Transport Certification and have thousands of flight hours before joining the flight team. First officers are required to have more initial hours than prescribed by regulation, and they are paired with experienced captains to ensure each of your aircraft is piloted by the best at all times. Pilots also undergo rigorous, airline-quality training conducted by Flight Safety International every six months, and Federal Aviation Administration-approved Check Airmen conduct line checks on each of our captains and first officers on a regular basis."
https://www.tapjets.com/home/safety
Are you saying that it seems this way for their test flights? Or for their flights for paying customers?
Its hard to tell just how serious these accusations are. For instance
>the airman who served as second-in-command only had a student pilot certificate
Presumably the first in command did have a full certificate (otherwise why wouldn't they mention it). The reality of this could be as mundane as "the guy sitting shotgun in the Cessna is only half way to his PPL and we bought a friend along".
Legally Tapjet may squeak by if their counterarguments are legitimate. At the very least fully rescinding their license may be overkill. This decision might be politically targeted at anyone trying to be Uber of the skies. I'd want to see more than this one off press release before calling them reckless.
I am curious if you're a pilot and if so have your CPL or ATP.
It's not about the PPL vs. CPL (and by definition they need more than a CPL). The difference is in what might be considered "compensation". The FAA's interpretation of this is so incredibly broad, it should scare the pants off anyone considering bending the rules here, and their lawyers should have picked up on this. Did the flights with vendors increase a relationship that might further an interest or negotation later? Did the flights help them improve their app? Did it result in a prospect of a return favor?
It may not be fair or just, but the FAA put those rules out there and a whole lot of people have been inconvenienced by them. I love that Tapjets is doing this, but they moved fast and not particularly wisely. If they thought they could run like Uber and ask for forgiveness later, they never worked with the FAA.
I got nothin. I'm just a slightly knowledgeable person.
Flying is on my bucket list. I've researched the topic a bit more than the average lay person. That's about it.
pursue flying now, you won't regret the freedom it brings.
Not exactly. Under 14 CFR 61.113(c) carrying a passenger as a PPL requires a bona fide common purpose (c.f. MacPherson-Winton interpretation) — you can't just go on a flight because they need to go there and you owe them a favor. Uber-style ridesharing has already been thoroughly rebuked by the FAA after two companies (Airpooler and Flytenow (YC S14)) attempted it, even if the pilot is only being reimbursed their pro rata share, under the justification that pilots cannot be holding out publicly for passengers on a flight they intend to take. It went all the way up to certiorari being denied by the Supreme Court in Flytenow v. FAA.
The FAA action this week makes it clear that Tapjet's flights were under Part 135, not Part 91. Flying a student pilot as SIC is in gross violation of the FARs.
Was TapJet reckless?
The long standing (~30 years) rule is the pilot's share can't be less than their proportionally equal share, based on the total number of people in the aircraft. The pilot can't walk away from a private flight with a net $0 cost or it isn't really a private flight, the pilot is being compensated. And the passengers and the pilot need to be engaged in a common purpose activity, ergo it cannot just be about transporting people from A to B if the pilot has no need himself to go from point A to point B.
If the purpose of the flight is to test an app for the company, it is unquestionably a commercial flight and the pilots are employees for the app company. Depending on myriad other factors, the size of the aircraft and how many passengers are on board, a two pilot crew rule might apply and if so absolutely a student pilot does not qualify.
Is that true even if there is no money involved? If your friend needs a ride from A to B and you were looking for an excuse to go flying that should be alright assuming you're not compensated for it. Or is that not right? Your parents are in another state and want to come visit, so you go pick them up via plane. That's certainly alright. I've never heard of it being an issue unless money was involved or a business trip.
Money may not have changed hands, but that sounds a lot like a business related activity.
I'm not sure which jets they were flying, but most business jets have a two person crew requirement, and a student pilot would not meet the crew requirements. It doesn't sound like their short response completely covers the FAA's allegations, but getting the flights to be considered Part 91 would be a big piece of it.
Example. Compensation can be interpreted as "the prospect of a return favor".
like a stick of gum.
You can fly under part 91 rules commercially but there are restrictions on how you can operate. You can operate under part 91 rules non-commercially, like I do, and that basically means that my passengers can only pay for their fair share of the gas burned. I can't make any profit. If the trip only burns 20 gallons I can't ask them to pay to fill up my tanks (51 gallons). But I can let them buy me a hamburger, as long as that's something they would have done anyway if I didn't take them flying.
Every flight under part 135 is considered "commercial," meaning that pilots must have a commercial rating as well as numerous other requirements like extra maintenance, inspections, and record keeping. Even if there are no paying passengers, a flight might still be under part 135 rules, but I'm not sure about the specifics.
I believe it's legal (but I'm not a lawyer) for a plane that flies under part 135 rules one day to be operated under part 91 rules the next day. Imagine flying a chartered flight under part 135 rules to Los Angeles. While on the ramp, the 100-hour inspection comes due, but the plane is still current with it's annual inspection. The owner of the jet would still be allowed to use it under part 91 rules, but it would not be allowed to conduct another charter flight until it passed the 100-hour inspection.
The carriers commonly make use of Part 91 for reposition flights to move equipment into place to resume original schedules following weather diversions or whatnot.
(me: Licensed Aircraft Dispatcher)
You seem to be both speaking with authority and saying the opposite of what I’d expect here. What’s your background in aviation law?
My interpretation of the TapJets response wasn’t that they were saying that the pilots had commercial ratings, it’s that they were saying that they didn’t need one, i.e., it was a non-commercial flight. TapJets doesn’t give any details, and neither does the FAA. But flying a light jet non-commercially can happen, so it’s not like TapJets is obviously in the wrong. Several celebrities own and pilot their own jets without commercial ratings.
I think in the end the FAA will stick with their ruling, I doubt they would issue an emergency revocation if they were on the fence.
FAA: You flew flights with unqualified pilots and with private ratings.
TapJets: All our flights were legal under FAR Part 91.501.
They didn’t dispute that the flights happened, and they didn’t dispute that they had passengers. They didn’t claim that the pilots did have commercial ratings. Thus, they must be claiming that they viewed the flights as non-commercial.
“Hire a private plane fast and for good price with the help of Tapjet! Best pilots, best quality, safety . We offer best price for private plane rental!”
If so, it’s interesting that they don’t add a “best” to “safety”.
Also, how does "using unqualified crew" equal in any way to democratising flying ?
Obviously pretty poor behaviour.
So much bureaucracy...
Operating aircraft isn't like web development where you can just push a buggy pile of JavaScript and fix it a few weeks later. We're talking about people's lives. This stuff has to work.
Enlighten me if I'm wrong.
Here's some statistics on that: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/data/Pages/aviation_stat... . Basically, you are 10x more likely to be in a fatal accident on a private plane than to be in any kind of accident at all on a commercial airline.
In the aviation world, even having your commercial is considered a "license to learn". Having your PPL simply implies that you can fly an aircraft in good weather conditions, should have the better judgement not to fly beyond your weather minimums, and have the ability not to kill anyone outside of your aircraft should conditions deteriorate while in the air. Even with my fixed wing PPL, I am extremely cautious with passengers knowing that I don't have nearly as much knowledge and experience as someone with their CPL/ATPL.
Source: PPL w/ instrument Fixed Wing & CPL-H
Why are you allowed to have passengers with a PPL if it's so dangerous?
And why does that reason stop applying when the passengers pay?
A Part 91 flight conducted by a PPL with passengers certainly isn't the safest activity the pilot or passengers could partake in. But its certainly enjoyable. Let's take a similar example. A hobbyist motorcycle racer owns a private track, and a friend wants a joy-ride. Similarly to a passenger on a Part 91 flight, a passenger on a high speed sports bike is at higher risk of fatality than a person who decided to spend the day relaxing at the beach. But doing so on private property with little/no risk to non-participants is not illegal. Many/Most high-risk activities are not illegal provided that the risk is only to the willing participants. While I can't be sure that's the reason the FAA allows low-hour non-CPL pilots to carry passengers, I would imagine it is a large contributing factor considering the statistical probability of fatality is with the pilot and passengers, not people in other planes or on the ground (to the best of my knowledge).
Part 135 and 121 operations have the license requirements such that people purchasing services have a reasonable expectation that the pilots involved have been properly trained, and are VERY safe.
Now to the kicker. Why are private pilots not allowed to accept ANY compensation? Really, NO COMPENSATION. Although I haven't personally heard of anyone getting their license revoked for something as little as paying the full cost of expenses, it is against the regulations for your passengers to pay more than half the pro-rata share of expenses (rent, fuel, etc...). This is a hotly debated item, that no one seems to have a good answer for. The most convinving argument I've heard is that it goes back to the late '20s when the regs for commercial pilots started going into place. The history around this is shaky, but supposedly the commercial license came about as a way to track interstate and foreign commerce. Supposedly the government at the time was scared of the ability to circumvent taxes since they couldn't as easily stop and check trucks or trains crossing borders. So they created the commercial license as a way of regulating inter-border trade to trusted pilots. I don't have a source on that unfortunately - more of an oral tradition story. But it makes the most sense to me of everything I've heard.
Another rabbit-hole I won't go too deep into is the issue of insurance. Getting insurance on an aircraft is much more expensive if it will be used for compensation purposes (Part 135 or 121). Even if a private pilot were able to get compensation from passengers or for cargo, the insurance rate would be astronomical(as a commercial rotor wing pilot, I can't find a job doing anything but instructing until I hit ~1000 hours due to insurance rates, if an insurance company would even let me fly on a commercial bird before then). And if you got in an accident while providing paid-for services without proper (for comp)insurance, it would not pay-out anything.
tl;dr You can have PPL w/ passengers because you're mostly only endangering yourself and willing passengers. Commercial operations are limited to using CPL/ATPL pilots such that consumers have a reasonable guarantee of safety. And nobody knows why private pilots can't be compensated (although if someone has a source with concrete answer I would love to hear it). Even if they could legally, they financially couldn't due to insurance costs.
The PPL is about 40 - 60 hours of experience at the time of rating, and CPL is 200+ hours. New PPL holders do not have an IFR endorsement, while most CPLs do. So the qualifications are vastly different.
In the industry, we say that a PPL is "a license to learn."
I read both press releases and the missing info is which aircraft were being used with the unrated pilots. If it was a plane requiring a SIC, and the second pilot was a student, then that was the real reason for the revocation.
Also, the catchall "recklessness" can be used at any time. Flying pax without a rated SIC would be an easy complaint to win.
If you and your three friends have agreed to split the cost of a joyride on the weekend in your Cessna and there's an unexpected storm, you're much more likely to just cancel. You're all going for fun, nobody wants to fly in bad weather, and you can just go on some other weekend.
Consider the same example where you have three paying customers who've you've agreed to fly around on the weekend. Now you'll be in a situation of having to refund tickets to disappointed customers. You might decide to go ahead with it anyway. Now you're putting members of the public at more risk for your own monetary interest.
" Just like Uber, Airbnb, and other successful companies that changed the status-quo, TapJets Inc. is now facing push-back by government regulators," said Debra Fein, Corporate Counsel for TapJets, " TapJets denies any wrongdoing, denies all allegations that FAA has made, and is prepared to vigorously defend itself against allegations despite it no longer being the need for TapJets to be a certified airline."
Sounds like they have more work to do on the whole "changed the status quo" thing; "are changing" or "trying to change" seems more accurate.
I find this to be a good litmus test. If someone takes pride in calling themselves "like Uber, AirBnB", then I personally will not do business with them. Both companies are primarily known for exploiting and breaking laws for a quick buck, and Uber in particular is also widely recognized as run by a bunch of antisocial assholes.
It's doubly stupid to call yourself that when you're responsible for the very lives of your customers, like in this case...
The FAA is rather sanguine in making their regulation cheap to follow, and in cutting unnecessary rules.
What's problematic here (and with many FAA cases) is the total lack of due process. The TapJets case hasn't even gone to court and the FAA has already punished them and issued a public statement before TapJets was even able to argue their case. They are guilty until proven innocent.
The "emergency order" used here is intended for actual emergencies, such as if a carrier was flying planes that weren't physically safe. A dispute over whether compensation occurred over a year ago is not an emergency and the use of such an order seems like an abuse of power.
Note: for all flights with paying customers (not friends and family) TapJets states that they operate according to the rules of any other air charter under part 135.
More to the point, there’s not enough information here to assess whether the FAA is overreacting, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt over an anonymous, newly-registered probable-sockpuppet account any day.
Thanks for your response but my tenure on hn is probably the least relevant part of the discussion.
Using the word 'sock puppet' implies that you are speaking for someone else and that you might have a hidden agenda. Thus, your tenure on HN is indeed relevant in this case.
I didn't even know about TapJets until yesterday but find it amusing that people think I'm a sockpuppet.
Does US airspace have a good safety record? Yes. Is that mutually exclusive from the FAA overreacting? No.
I think they 100% should be investigated but unless something legitimately risky is happening then I really just have to roll my eyes at this emergency order. FAA policy is heavily influenced by airlines so it would be unsurprising if this was more politically motivated than anything, but until I hear more specifics about the models of plane used I'll wait and see.
Attacking another user like that is explicitly against HN's rules, and we ban accounts that do it. What kind of community are we if we insult new commenters just because we don't agree with what they say? Please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Caveat 1: I'm not an aviation lawyer, or indeed licensed to practice law of any kind. Caveat 2: I am a licensed rotorcraft PPL, certified to fly helicopters non-commercially so I have a marginal amount of study of the FAR/AIM.
Now, some background. There are three primary ways to accomplish a flight:
A) Part 91 of the FAR covers non-commercial flights. This includes pleasure flights, such as private aviation, and flight schools. Unless a friend is giving you a ride in their plane (in which case you're only allowed legally to pay your pro-rata portion of flight costs) or if you're a student pilot (in which case your co-pilot must be performing flight instruction and be a Certified Flight Instructor with their Commercial license) you probably have never flown a Part 91 flight. There's really no way that TapJets could have been operating under Part 91: it's not a flight school and it is being run as a commercial operation.
B) Part 135 (not "part 131" in parent comment) covers air taxi / charter operations that are performed on an ad-hoc / on-demand basis. The bar for such flights is much higher than Part 91 flights. Pilots must not only have their commercial certification (250 hours of flight experience for fixed-wing) but also are subject to further training and the craft and overall operations are subject to a higher bar of scrutiny. This is sane: if you pay a commercial provider to ferry you from one place to the next, you have a reasonable expectation of safety.
C) Part 121 "air carrier" operations with regularly scheduled commercial flights. If you've purchased a plane ticket on a carrier (think: United, Delta, American, Southwest, etc) the flight you were on was almost certainly a Part 121 flight. These flights are subject to the highest scrutiny since they have the highest assumed customer safety. Pilots are held to an incredibly high bar, the Airline Transport Pilot level of certification, requiring a minimum of 1500 hours of flight experience. This also makes sense: if you're buying a regular plane ticket on, say, Hipmunk, your assumption is that your flight will be professionally and safely flown.
Now to address the specific commentary:
1) That's correct that if a private pilot is flying their friends and family who are not paying anything for a flight, that is a lawful Part 91 flight. I'm 99% confident this is not the service TapJets is offering.
2) Most commercial planes are not currently certified for single-pilot operations. There has been specific successful effort to do so for Very Light Jets but I would be surprised if TapJets was flying any Single-Pilot IFR certified aircraft. (Happy to learn more here if this guess is wrong.)
3) The FAA's legal jurisdiction is to secure and make safe the navigable airspace of the United States of America. They have full regulatory jurisdiction to make calls on what constitutes safe flight or not and to enforce such rules, as provided by Congress. They are not required to first successfully pursue a civil or criminal trial against an individual or organization in order to enforce regulatory code. In this case it would appear that a Part 135 licensed operator was performing flights outside of Part 135 requirements and has had their Part 135 certification revoked. TapJets "stating" that they conform to Part 135 is not sufficient; the FAA appears to have solid evidence that they have not.
For better or for worse, flight operations in the US are considered a privilege and not a right and Congress has given the FAA permission to regulate things that fly in the navigable airspace. (See US v Causby to begin going down a rabbit hole of the still not-very-well-defined notion of what constitutes "navigable airspace" but it certainly extends at least from 400 feet above ground everywhere over US territory to th...
I would be interested to know exactly what model of plane they we're flying with a student pilot in the right seat.
But is it overreacting?
All systems of regulations are imperfect, but FAA regulations are the product of decades of work by very, very smart people. As a whole, FAA regulations are hugely concerned with what seem like 'minor infractions' because 'minor infractions' are often enough to start a chain of events that leads to major accidents. This is especially true as experience increases because experienced people are so much less likely to make major mistakes that they have to be concerned with the small chinks in the armor of safety.
The FAA does have very smart individuals, but they are also heavily lobbied by airlines and are subject to conflicts of interest just like cities with Uber/Lyft.
They are the regulator. They have the power to put in place temporary measures. Much like police can confiscate your driving license.
Sorry but I don't want my house squashed by a TapJet plane because the pilot got ill and the student pilot had no clue how to land the plane.
So, a full year ago? Not a typo, but an emergency from 374 days ago?
Anyone that knows anything about aviation is just rolling their eyes at TapJet and saying good riddence. The “Uber” model of just blatantly ignoring regulations to get a leg up doesn’t work in aviation. While pilots and airlines aren’t exactly fans of the FAA, most would say that on the whole the system works well—and in both general aviation and our ATC system the US is the envy of the aviation world.
TapJet isn’t the first, but hopefully the last, startup to try such shenanigans.