When a federal appeals court in April ruled, in part, that flight instruction constitutes carriage of a person for compensation, it perhaps unwittingly created a storm of uncertainty in the U.S. flight training community and those operating aircraft in the three categories primarily affected: limited, experimental and primary. As we noted in June’s issue, the court’s interpretation was that FAR 91.315 fails to provide an exemption process for those aircraft to be used for flight instruction, “which is at odds with the FAA’s long-standing regulatory treatment of the activity.”
In response, the FAA in July published a policy clarification that accomplished little more than angering general aviation’s alphabet soup. The agency’s immediate fix was to expand the process for obtaining a LODA—letter of deviation authority—to enable online requests. As we wrote at the time, “According to EAA, the FAA’s position is that ‘any instructor is ‘operating’ an aircraft, regardless of who owns, rents, or otherwise uses the aircraft, and regardless of whether the use of the aircraft is compensated. Therefore, paying any instructor to provide training violates the language of FARs 91.315 (Limited), 91.319(a)(2) (Experimental), and 91.325 (Primary).” AOPA President and CEO Mark Baker said his organization finds “a new FAA invoked paperwork process to simply obtain ‘approval’ to do what pilots have already been doing safely for years is simply mindboggling.”
