For Better or Worse... The FAA Has A New 5-Year Lease On Life As Soon As The President Signs

It's just about done... despite years of hype, delays, attacks on basic aero-liberties and more power grabs than we can count, the FAA Reauthorization bill has passed both the House and Senate, awaiting only the president's signature to get the ball rolling.

The bill passed in Senate today with a vote of 93-6, while the House version of the bill was passed, last week, by a vote of 398-23.

While the bill puts aside some of the most ill-conceived and contentious issues of recent years -- most notably the horrific power grab by the airlines disguised as "ATC Privatization" championed by a few elected officials with very close relationships to the airline lobby, there is still a lot to like... and dislike... in various aspects of the 1200 page monster bill.

Reaction, from over a dozen aviation associations, has already started hitting the wires and the analysis is all over the map. Most disturbing, so far, are the specific and unwarranted restrictions in the bill that adversely affect virtually every model airplane in the country, ostensibly due to drone hysteria and ignorance on the part of several elected officials who listened too much to the dozens of players in the commercial drone lobby and too little to the hundreds of thousands of flyers from the model aviation community.

At the same time, some truly onerous issues were resolved, including the huge bill's affect on groups like EAA that had to deal with millions of dollars of fees over the last few years as well as a number of pro-aviation provisions pushed through by Senator Jim Inhofe that have made it past the anti-aviation forces at play.

We're analyzing now... more info to come.

FMI: www.faa.gov