FAA’s ADS-B Rebate

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At one time in this country, government problem-solving consisted of throwing money at whatever obstacle seemed to be impeding progress. Sometimes it even worked. Of late, the philosophy has shifted to cutting taxes, driving deficits and acute budgetary paralysis. I’m not sure where the FAA’s decision—apparently—to help fund installation of ADS-B systems fits, exactly.

As is supposed to be revealed Monday, the agency is considering a $500 rebate to owners who equip their aircraft with ADS-B and thus become members in good standing of the NextGen system. Will this stimulate what everyone agrees is lagging equipage on the part of owners who are persistently and consistently unimpressed with the benefits of ADS-B? One can, for the sake of the agency’s plans, only hope.

Because there are now so many ADS-B offerings out there, it’s hard to put a price point on the average or typical cost of an ADS-B Out installation. At the bottom of the spectrum are non-TSO’d boxes suitable for experimental aircraft for about $1300. The lowest conceivable price—all-in—for a certified aircraft is probably around $4000 or a little less. But with at least 34 different products to choose from—you read that right—you can spend as much as $15,000 on an ADS-B upgrade if you have money to burn. And some owners actually can afford that. I’d estimate that the average budget ADS-B install will cost around $5000 to $5500.

So does a $500 pot sweetener make much of a difference? I’d guess no. When I ran the rebate idea by our inhouse avionics guru, Larry Anglisano, he snortled a snortle that implied “that’s your best offer?” Still, both of us agreed that some owners will take the offer. If I needed to install ADS-B in the Cub, which I don’t, I certainly would. Why not?

We’ll probably never know, but I wonder why FAA/DOT reached the point of actually funding even a token percentage of the installations. Certainly, one reason is that owners aren’t accepting ADS-B at nearly the pace the FAA hoped and what will be necessary to meet the 2020 mandate without end-game chaos. So far, the FAA says about 18,000 GA airplanes and 500 or so commercial aircraft have equipped. The total number of aircraft that will need to equip is rubbery. I’ve seen numbers as low as 160,000 and as high as 199,000 from GAMA. Even at the lower end of the estimate, that means as many as 150,000 airplanes remain to equip in the remaining 42 months before the mandate kicks in. That works out to about 900 systems a week. That’s a lot of avionics work and I’m beginning to believe those who said the industry won’t have the capacity and we’ll see a huge logjam a year from now.

I also wonder if someone in DOT didn’t run some numbers and figure out that system safety will actually diminish if equipage doesn’t reach some critical mass by a certain date and that it would be a more economical tradeoff to just buy the systems for those recalcitrant owners. As a point of public policy, I like that kind of thinking. But to work, the carrot would have to be a lot bigger. Maybe half the cost of the lowest-priced systems, say about $2000. That would be a much bigger investment, of course—maybe about $350 million to $400 million—but NextGen is a $40 billion system, so it’s no more than 1 percent of the total. Could that deliver a big payback in improved safety? It could, considering many of those aircraft would then have onboard weather and traffic where they don’t have it now. And those already equipped would be able to see them in adjacent airspace.

If the FAA wanted to get really creative, they could put the same team on ADS-B as jollied along the approvals for Dynon avionics in certified airframes announced at Sun ‘n Fun in April. That might knock another grand off low-end installation costs.

While I understand why people are resistant to installing this equipment, the least valid reason to me is anger at regulation and government mandates funded by the individual. For better or worse, the government has decided that ADS-B is the cornerstone of future air traffic control. Refusing to play based on principle is like moving to Canada because you don’t like election results. (This year, I may make an exception…)

So, once again, owners have to decide whether to equip now, later or at all. If you don’t need to fly in mandated airspace, as is the case for me, you don’t need to bother. If you can mostly avoid it, you can probably wait, but I don’t think waiting is going to yield either substantially less expensive or more capable systems. Meanwhile, you miss the benefits of having ADS-B and everyone who has paid for the upgrade tells us it’s worth it and they’re satisfied with the investment.

Anyone who owns an airplane for serious travel shouldn’t wait much longer, in my view. Like not even a year because whether the people who say the shops will get slammed are right or not, having an airplane that you really need grounded for lack of ADS-B would be kind of silly. Take the 500 bucks and be happy. I wouldn’t wait around for a better offer.

Tuesday addition: In yesterday’s press conference, SecDOT Anthony Foxx said the FAA wanted to put its money where its mouth was with regard to ADS-B equipage, hence the rebate program. The agency is paying for this effort–a total of $10 million, by my count–out of its ADS-B budget. In other words, it scraped up the money. To be fair, if it had wanted a larger program, a congressional appropriation would have been necessary and the likelihood of getting that through the House is exactly zero, in my estimation.

Having said that, I don’t see that this rebate program is going to help much, but I can see some negatives. One of them came pixeling into the inbox more or less immediately. Wrote one reader, “TheFAA $500 ADS-B rebate is a slap in the face for every law abiding proactive citizen who equipped his/her airplane already. First we pay higher prices due to less competition, then we have the additional hassles due to necessary updates while the system gets ready for prime time. Thats all ok, it was our choice. But then, the $500 is not FAAs money. It is the money we as taxpayers pay to the government. So now in addition to the activities to get ADS-B going, the proactive have to pay additional money to the procrastinators. No wonder the political climate is slowly changing for worse,” wroteGerd Pfeifle, ofVero Beach, Florida.

That comment goes to the argument that the requirement to equip with ADS-B is either a tax, a toll or a user fee. Take your pick of those; it’s either one of them or all of them. The FAA is clearly financing its expensive new system on the backs of users. In that context, as I said above, I would have preferred a much larger program, like half the cost of a budget install as a basic investment in the safety of transportation infrastructure. Foxx crowed about the U.S. system being the safest in the world and we got it that way by investing in it. I thought that undercut his argument that DOT was putting its money where its mouth is.

What will be viewed, I think, as a trivial assistance to owners, issymptomatic of a larger malaise inflicting the U.S. As part of a general conviction that the government is incompetent, we’ve come to a knee-jerk aversion to investment in basic transportationinfrastructure and we’re paying the price for it in $6000 avionics invoices.

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