The FAA's AeroNav division held a meeting the other day for 70-some aviation app developers about its "plan" to launch a fee-based data dissemination system. Currently, app developers, and the general public for that matter, can get AeroNav's nav data for free.
AeroNav, however, is stuck between a rock and some high terrain as it tries somehow to navigate the digital age, which was brought home to them 30 years down the road by the explosion of iPad chart reader apps. Blame it on Steve Jobs if you will, but pilots are leaving AeroNav's paper charts and binders in droves for iPads, in part because of the price. This is, it occurs to me, the very essence of disruptive technology, and AeroNav is the dinosaur being disrupted.
It wishes it could simply charge for data as it sees fit, but there are any number of good reasons it can't; the foremost is regulatory.
By law it can only charge for the costs involved in disseminating (mailing DVDs, servers, and such) the data, and for "compiling" it. With the cost of disseminating the data being minimal and no one quite sure what compiling needs to be done in order to be charged for, it leaves AeroNav at a loss for how to charge for a product it's not supposed to charge for. One develper told me that AeroNav is trying to parse the meaning of the word "compilation" in order to justify the fee plan.
You have to give these people credit: they're knocking themselves out trying and failing. They rolled out the plan by surprise by without notice cutting off access to hundreds of developers. They refuse to talk to the media about what they're doing, why they're doing it or how much it will cost. They throw up smokescreens about safety and product control when they have to know that easy access to charts that iPad apps afford means a huge overall increase in safety of flight. Then when they finally announce pricing, they do it with a plan that's ill thought out and based on faulty numbers.
I wish that AeroNav had just come clean from the start and told their bosses, "Look, the digital age has changed our entire business model. We can't give away paper charts any more. Help." Maybe the way they are allowed to collect fees is outdated. Maybe they need to develop a plan to raise revenue by getting fees from pilot-users. All of that is fair, and something could have been done.
In the end, that's what we'll likely get, too. When we buy ForeFlight or WingX Pro or Pilot MyCast or any one of a number of iPad apps out there, we're likely to pay an extra $50 or so toward AeroNav's continuing fine work at gathering data and crafting it into charts. I don't know about you, but I'll be writing that check with a good deal of animosity in my heart for the agency that has done such a ham-handed job of handling what could have been and should have been a straightforward transition to a much-needed fee restructuring. Shame on them.
By all accounts, the meeting that AeroNav conducted on Tuesday at its Washington, D.C. offices was about what we'd expected it to be. I say "by all accounts" because we weren’t invited to attend. The business head of AeroNav, Abigail Smith, in fact, wouldn't return my phone calls or answer questions submitted by email to her through the FAA's press office. So I can only go by third person accounts. Why they would prevent the press from attending defies me. Do they think they're making friends? Do they think we're not going to talk to those who attended and get the worst possible take on the proceedings from the most disaffected of them? And who exactly do they think they work for, anyway? The public has a right to know what's going on. It strikes me as heavy handed, at best, that they're trying to keep the proceedings away from the public eye. Not to mention naive. Social media is changing the way the public, here and in the Middle East, get at the truth. Have they not been watching the news?
Maybe I should drop them a note. There are apps for keeping abreast of such things. Free ones, at that.
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Submitted by SocalFlyer on December 15, 2011.
Obviously, someone missed the new paradigm: Government of the People, [but] by the Bureaucracy, and for the Bureaucracy.
Heck, these days even the Imperial President can’t bring ‘em to heel, so what chance do us mere humans have?
Submitted by sunflowerflyer on December 15, 2011.
As a purely recreational pilot, I was hoping to someday afford bringing my license current and flying again. It looks like the FAA has other thoughts.
Submitted by swcarman on December 15, 2011.
It seems to me this is just one more instance in which these bureaucrats, afraid for their own budgets, have taken it upon themselves to in effect raise their own self-directed taxes or user fees to keep things at the status quo. Perhaps if each of us brought this to the attention of our own Congressional representative and asked them to make an inquiry, it might remind the FAA that they were darned near brought to their knees earlier this year and that it can happen again.
Submitted by ginnyw on December 15, 2011.
I should think it would be pretty unwieldy to charge an individual user, since we're not buying the data from them directly. And what happens to "users" like Jepps, who are modifying the gov't data and selling it in their own proprietary format?
And these guys need to do some research to pin down their numbers, anyway, or they'll be over-and under-charging. I also think it won't be long until someone figures out a good hack of whatever system they choose, and we all start swapping our data around. Or someone out there knows how to produce the data we use independently of the government. No one knows what happens in your cockpit but you. Just another way in which we are likely slowly to slide away from certification, one plane at a time, until the Feds have lost control of GA.
Submitted by alanmurg on December 15, 2011.
I won't be paying.
Paper charts and the Mark 1 Eyeball have been sufficient for me for 55 years, no reason to change for LSA flying.
Submitted by pjsowe on December 16, 2011.
Electronic charts are the way of the future that we will all need to eventually move to. The government and app developers have realized this and are all scrambleing to figure out how they can best cash in. If there are all sorts of mark-ups along the way in distribution from the source to user the fee will be over the top. An annual fee of $25 per piloy for access to all chart updates should cover costs. This would also promote safety as out of date charts will no longer be found in so many cockpits.
Remember the costs associated with printing, distribution, left overs, etc. will be gone.
Submitted by Recordo on December 16, 2011.
Apple's current command of the tablet market depends on a basically uninformed buyer who thinks that despite the iPad being sealed off from datalink that has become a universal standard--USB-- the Apple commercials are just so compelling that somehow COOL overcomes DUMB even in an airplane.
The real "user fee" here is the 30% markup you have to pay to buy anything that runs on the iPad. That means that you can't buy an application from a developer, you have to buy through Apple's AppStore.
It's not as if Apple and the FAA are saying "My way or the highway." There are excellent tablets from HP, Samsung, Lenovo and others.
The drawbacks to the iPad, basically its closed box architecture and its predatory software distribution model, highlight these Android and Windows solutions and unless Apple comes up with a cure for obesity, they are likely to emerge as smarter solutions. But that requires a slightly more intelligent consumer, one not quite as swayed by the iPad's cleavage.
Submitted by robert goyer on December 16, 2011.
The same fees will apply to Android based tablets, windows machines.... You name it. The fee is for the data independent of the platform on which it is run.
Submitted by Sjc_pilot on December 16, 2011.
There comments made about Apple have zero to do with the FAA issues, and also are, inaccurate and lack zero relationship to reality. Let's keep this focused on the real issue, which is a tax being levied on pilots by the government after our hard earned dollars have been directed into the general fund and the aviation trust fund to create this data for our use.
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