Getting the Lead Out and the Dollars In

The first Capitol Hill hearings appurtenant 2023’s FAA reauthorization bill are scheduled to commence on Wednesday, 28 September 2022. The hearings—in a literal and profound sense—will determine the objectives, limitations, and budgets with which the world’s most powerful and influential civil aviation authority will be respectively charged and constrained for the next five-years.

Among the hearings to be convened is a proceeding titled “FAA Reauthorization: Integrating New Entrants into the National Airspace System”—of which the U.S. Senate subcommittee on commerce, science, and transportation remarked:

“This hearing marks the first in a series of discussions regarding the 2023 reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration and will examine issues relating to the integration into the National Airspace System (NAS) of new entrants, such as advanced air mobility (AAM) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) operators.” The press release continued, “Topics such as the certification of emerging aircraft technologies, airspace management, workforce, and infrastructure needed to support the deployment of AAM and UAS into the NAS will be considered.” 

The hearing is to include statements from Commercial Drone Alliance executive director Lisa Ellman, Eviation CEO and president Gregory Davis, FAA Center of Excellence for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ASSURE) executive director Colonel Stephen Luxion, Honeywell Aerospace vice president urban air mobility and unmanned aerial systems Stephane Fymat, and NBAA CEO and president Edward M. Bolen.

Proponents of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) speak enthusiastically and at great length to the potential benefits of emergent electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) concepts. Stakeholders in the UAS/UAV/EVTOL industry resolutely posit that such technologies stand to provide airborne transport, delivery, and even medical services to remote rural areas—thereby democratizing air-transportation and furthering both public commerce and individual wellbeing.

Conversely, opponents of AAM argue that flight is an energy-intensive undertaking, requiring vastly greater investment of finite resources than today’s high-efficiency road-vehicles. Ergo, to ontologically supersede terrestrial travel with air travel is to tremendously increase the net energy required to move the same number of people. Worse yet, to habituate populations accustomed to automobiles to AAM vehicles—which is to say culturally supersede low-energy terrestrial travel with high-energy air-travel—stands to increase worldwide energy consumption to unsustainable degrees.

Opposition to AAM comprises primarily indictment of the apocryphal notion that electricity is a clean power source. Parties adversarial to the proliferation of manned and unmanned electric air-taxis point out that over eighty-percent of global electricity is generated by burning coal. Hence,  to produce electricity enough to power a worldwide fleet of electric vehicles—be they automobiles, aircraft, or even pogo-sticks—would catastrophically raise atmospheric levels of greenhouse gasses.

Congressmen Rick Larsen (Democrat, Washington State) and Garret Graves (Republican, Louisiana) are among the lawmakers to whose discretion the matter of AAM will presently be commended. Responding to eVTOL makers’ assertions that their products will be ready for FAA certification by 2024, Congressman Graves remarked: “If we start all of a sudden throwing these aviation technologies into communities, and people just see it, they won't know what it is.”

Mr. Graves perspicaciously alludes to the tendency of uninitiated populations to conflate unfamiliar technologies with threats, and to react rashly to such.

FMI: www.congress.gov