On November 12, 2024, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals (“DC Circuit”) took a dramatic step on the rocky road to ensuring Federal agency compliance with the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”). In its opinion, deciding the fate of the Airspace Management Plan governing flights over four National Parks in

The development of Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles (“VTOL”) looks like the wave of the future, especially where highway traffic is becoming an increasing impediment to a constructive workday. All is not rosy, however, where VTOL must share the air with conventional aircraft and the ground with densely populated urban areas.

The most advanced VTOL to date is a U.S. based technology anticipated to become available for commercial use in 2023. The aircraft is configured to carry four passengers and a pilot (for emergencies, as the aircraft is powered by electricity and designed to fly autonomously); will have a range of about 60 miles; and is expected to be able to take-off and land up to 1,000 times per hour at massive skyports, located on plots of land as small as one acre located throughout the cities served.

Another form of hybrid VTOL currently being developed by a Chinese firm and a Slovakia–based company is a flying car designed to take-off from a runway like a plane, but with the capability of converting into a surface vehicle with retractable wheels and wings.

Finally, there is a hybrid/helicopter/conventional aircraft, the distinguishing characteristic of which is technology aimed at addressing one of the primary issues surrounding the operation of aircraft – noise. To do this, speed of the main rotor will be redirected while flying, apparently without jeopardizing the integrity of the flight process. While numerous other high-end car companies are attempting to break into the market, most were too late to the game, starting the development process in 2018-19.

There are, however, numerous regulatory, as well as developmental hurdles to overcome.Continue Reading Regulation of VTOLS Lags Far Behind Technology

Over the weekend, the Trump administration added the United Kingdom and Ireland to the list of countries subject to the European travel ban (sometimes the “Ban”) it originally announced on Wednesday, March 11, 2020. In addition to prohibiting the entry of aliens who were physically present within the Schengen Area, the Ban now prohibits the

Airports, airlines, and travelers face a number of dynamic questions and challenges in the wake of the Trump administration’s abrupt televised announcement that the federal government “will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.” The announced European travel ban (sometimes the “Ban”) is set forth in a Presidential Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Certain Additional Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus (the “Proclamation”). As discussed below, the Proclamation provides further detail that was not immediately clear after the President’s brief televised announcement on Wednesday night.
Continue Reading Travelers, Airlines, and Airports Face Uncertainty after President Trump Announces European Travel Ban

In a somewhat unsubtle attempt to implement the current Administration’s 2017 Executive Order “Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda,” allowing federal agencies to simplify their regulatory mandates, the Department of Transportation (“DOT”), on behalf of its subsidiary agency the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”), has instead thrown complex and expensive regulatory/legal hurdles in the path of consumers who attempt to enforce the provisions of current protective regulations. Specifically, the DOT published, on February 28, 2020, in the Federal Register, a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”), that purports to simplify “definitions of the terms ‘unfair’ and ‘deceptive’ in the Department’s regulations implementing its aviation consumer protection statute.” See 85 Fed.Reg. 11881. The devil, however, is, as usual, in the details.
Continue Reading FAA Seeks to Free Airlines from “Burden” of Consumer Protections

The Los Angeles Times reports that Uber, the ridesharing company, plans to extend its reach into the stratosphere by developing an “on-demand air transportation service.”  The plan appears to be that customers will use Uber’s surface transportation ride hailing system to hop a ride to a “vertiport” where an electrically powered aircraft will carry passengers to another vertiport at which they will be met by another phalanx of Uber drivers waiting to take otherwise stranded customers off the roofs of parking garages and into the traffic they supposedly avoided by using the proposed above ground transportation option.  

The purpose appears to be to allow customers to fly from one part of town to another.  Very creative, but shockingly absent all but one off-hand reference to the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”), and the federal government’s total dominance over the airspace of the United States, 49 U.S.C. § 40103(a), including the design and construction of airports, which definition includes “vertiports.” 14 C.F.R. § 157.2. 
 
Whether recognized or not, Uber’s scheme faces a host of questions, and potential regulatory objections, that range from the way in which such episodic operations will merge with the arrival and departure paths of conventional aircraft, to the noise of even electric aircraft operating over existing residential neighbors and pedestrians using city streets.  While these are, to a large extent, the same issues posed by the operation of unmanned aircraft, or drones, they are even more immediate in this case, because the proposed electric aircraft are larger, potentially louder, and, perhaps most importantly, impinge on conventional aircraft regulatory areas long controlled by the FAA.

Continue Reading Uber Flies High in FAA’s Airspace

Airports and airlines across the nation last week welcomed the introduction of two bills aimed at alleviating mounting congestion in airport security lines by increasing TSA efficiency and reallocating billions of dollars in security fees paid by passengers.
 
The FASTER Act (H.R. 5340) is aimed at ensuring passenger security fees are used for aviation

On March 17, 2016, the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee of the United States Senate approved amendments to the most recent funding legislation for the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”), the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2016, that, among other things, appear to preempt to preempt local and state efforts to regulate the operation of unmanned aircraft systems (“UAS” or “drones”).  

Federal preemption is the displacement of state and local laws which seek to govern some aspect of a responsibility that Congress views as assigned by the Constitution exclusively to the federal government.  Preemption by statute is not uncommon in legislation dealing with transportation, and its relationship to interstate commerce.  For example, the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, 49 U.S.C. § 41713, specifically “preempts” local attempts to control “prices, routes and service” of commercial air carriers by local operators or jurisdictions.  Similarly, the Airport Noise and Capacity Act of 1990, 49 U.S.C. § 47521, et seq. (“ANCA”) preempts local efforts to establish airport noise or access restrictions.  The Senate’s current amendments, however, appear, at the same time, broader in scope, and more constrained by exceptions than previous legislative efforts.  They also hit closer to home for the average American concerned about the impact on daily life of the proliferation of UAS for all uses, including, but not limited to, the delivery of packages.  
 

Continue Reading Senate Version of Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Preempts Local Drone Regulations

On October 1, 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) adopted stricter regulation on ozone emissions that will fall heavily on California, and most particularly on the transportation sector, including airlines.  The new standard strengthens limits on ground level ozone to 70 parts per billion (“PPB”), down from 75 PPB adopted in 2008.  The EPA’s action arises from the mandate of the Clean Air Act (“CAA”), from which the EPA derives its regulatory powers, 42 U.S.C. § 7409(a)(1), and which requires that pollution levels be set so as to protect public health with an “adequate margin of safety.  42 U.S.C. § 7409(b).  

The change has inspired significant controversy throughout the country, but most particularly in Southern California which purportedly has the nation’s worst air quality and has already failed to meet previous ozone standards.  The issues arise out of the likelihood that the new standards will require steep emissions cuts falling most heavily on the transportation sector including trains, trucks, ships and, not least, aircraft.  

Continue Reading Airlines Will Be Affected by New Federal Ozone Standards

In a strange twist on the normal relationship between federal regulatory agencies, the National Transportation Safety Board (“NTSB”) has found the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) a primary culprit in the October 31, 2014 disastrous test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, in which one of the two pilots was killed, and debris was spread over a 33 mile area in San Bernardino County, northeast of Los Angeles.  

 
The issue appears to be the grant of a waiver by FAA from the existing rules governing safety of interplanetary vehicles, despite FAA’s own safety consultant’s warning that Virgin Galactic was violating those rules.  The claim is that, while Congress did not delegate to FAA the authority to implement regulations as stringent as those applicable to commercial aircraft, FAA managers specifically ignored the repeated advice of safety engineers that Virgin Galactic had not fully complied with the regulations that do exist.  Specifically, FAA safety personnel claim that FAA managers based their decision to grant the waiver on the remoteness of the Town of Mojave where the aircraft’s launch company, Scaled, is based, and on the surrounding area where the company planned its test flights.  
 
In the end, the NTSB found that, although the co-pilot had erred by prematurely unlocking the rocketship’s movable tail, the FAA and the launch company bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility.  On the one hand, the launch company had failed to ascertain that a single error by an operator could lead to the ship’s destruction.  On the other hand, the FAA, acceding to pressure to approve the permit quickly, had failed to ensure that the company took this lack of redundancy into account.  Exacerbating the issue is the fact that SpaceShipTwo is one of three commercial rockets to crash in the span of eight months.  
 

Continue Reading NTSB Faults FAA in Private Spacecraft Investigation