Beginning in late October 2024 and extending into mid-November, the FAA’s General Aviation & Commercial Division (AFS-800), part of the agency’s Flight Standards Service, published a handful of advisory circulars (ACs) providing guidance on how the FAA wants pilots and flight instructors to comply with its various regulations.
While it’s not new that the FAA publishes ACs—they’ve been around as long as the agency itself, if not longer—it is somewhat unusual that so many, eight in total, would come out of the same office within a few days of each other.
The table above is a list of the revised and new ACs, their date of publication and whether they are new, revised or simply incorporate Change 1, as some updated ACs have been designated.
Boilerplate language in a typical AC includes something like, “This AC describes acceptable means, but not the only means” to implement or comply with FAA regulations. They also typically state, “The contents of this document do not have the force and effect of law and are not meant to bind the public in any way, and the document is intended only to provide information to the public regarding existing requirements under the law or agency policies.”
All that said, the FAA will typically start with a relevant AC when it considers compliance with its regulations. Since this raft of ACs concerns pilot and instructor certification, as well as proficiency, the FAA will use them as a baseline against which to assess compliance. In other words, you’ve been warned what the agency wants to see.
New-Tech Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems Coming
Another revised advisory circular, AC 90-120, “Operational Use of Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems,” was released by the FAA in November. It not only now has application to a broader range of operators but also marks the introduction of a new software standard, ACAS X.
“ACAS X is the next generation of software replacing TCAS. ACAS X is more sophisticated than the TCAS systems we use now,” according to Richard Boll, chair, NBAA Domestic Operations Committee, Airspace and Flight Technologies Subcommittee. “The technology and algorithms currently used date back to the 1970s.”
The AC applies to Part 121 and 135 air carriers, plus entities providing training to those them. It’s also relevant to fractional operations, FAR Parts 129 and 142, and large aircraft under Part 91 subpart G, according to the association.
Among the advances expected from ACAS X is enhanced performance in parallel runway operations over existing technology. “An extensively studied limitation of TCAS II is that more than 80 percent of its alerts are triggered by situations in which the ownship and the intruder actually are intentionally, safely separated,” said Michael Castle, a systems engineer at Aurora Sciences and a contracted subject matter expert for the FAA, according to the Flight Safety Foundation. “We want to try to reduce those….”
AOPA ASI Releases New McSpadden Safety Report
The AOPA Air Safety Foundation has published its latest update on general aviation safety, the 34th Richard G. McSpadden Report (formerly the Joseph T. Nall Report), published on the association’s web site. According to AOPA/ASI, “This year’s report underwent a modernization effort to align with industry standards. These changes largely affect non-commercial fixed-wing.”
According to the report, “Loss of control events continue to be the leading causal factor, and weather-related accidents remain highly lethal.” See www.aopa.org for more.
