SSA responds to ANPRM

On Wed, 19 Aug 2015 03:32:29 +0000, George Haeh wrote:

I have been slogging through the some 220 responses and came across a
response from the NTSB:

http://www.regulations.gov/contentStrea mer?documentId=FAA-2015-2147-
0137&attachmentNumber=1&disposition =attachment&contentType=pdf

"our main concern was to ensure that gliders are detectable by an
aircraft equipped with a traffic alert and collision avoidance system
(TCAS)"

Gliders are already kept well away from air carriers by Class B and C.

That makes the primary beneficiaries of the ANPRM private jet owners
able to afford TCAS - $30K to $200K before installation.

As long as they're transmitting ADS-B, anybody with PowerFLARM knows
exactly where they are from several miles away and can avoid.

You took that one sentence well out of context. With the advent of ADS-
B, the NTSB now believes gliders should also lose their ADS-B exemption.
ADS-B In capability is a whole lot cheaper than TCAS, and will be much
more widely deployed.

As I keep saying, this ANPRM isn't about transponders, it's about
transponders and ADS-B, as should be obvious from the survey questions
they asked. I believe FAA has decided to suck gliders into NextGen, and
are using the (extremely late) letters from Reid and Amodei as
justification. I'm generally in favor of that in principle, but hope we
can get regulations that make it more practical given the constraints of
gliders.

-Dave