March 3 was not an auspicious day for officials in the FAA’s ADS-B Program Office. That was the final day for submission of comments from the user community on the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), which described how ADS-B would be introduced into the National Airspace System (NAS), and the means and timing of required user compliance. But the overall negative tone of the comments must have disappointed agency planners, who are now faced with rethinking many of the details of their proposals.
The FAA certainly expected some negative comments about ADS-B–it receives some for virtually every NPRM–but agency officials anticipated general user community approval of its ADS-B proposals. According to one FAA insider, the agency certainly did not expect the critical responses from many of the organizations that the FAA expected to be supportive. The two most influential–the Air Transport Association (ATA) and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA)–made their dissatisfaction abundantly clear. The former commented, “The NPRM is materially deficient,” while the latter said, “The proposed rule is not acceptable in its current form.”
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