I also hide information that is relevant to only a small subset of pilots, e.g. special training for Mitsubishi MU-2B pilots and regulations specific to Alaska. And does anyone ever care that if you have a private or commercial pilot certificate issued before July 1, 1945 it will not be renewed?

The first draft of the content is available at http://touringmachine.com/FARs/ and comments would be appreciated. It has the complete content of the relevant FARs—the only changes I made are to formatting, (so that the sub-sections are easier to follow) and ellipses (…) to hide content that I don’t think private pilots would be interested in. If you’d like to comment on my choices, you can send an email to FARsCondensed at my company, LearningFundamentals.com, or PM me.

I need to proof the content a few more times before I put it on the main page of my website. The app will be available in a couple of weeks and the first iteration of the app will have just the content on the website. Future versions will have links to discussions of parts that are ambiguous. I have a collection of links but if you have some good ones you like to share, I’d appreciate you forwarding them.

I have a collection of the FAA Knowledge Tests and answers but I haven’t looked at them for a while, so I need to verify that the answers and links are still correct. At some point I’ll put the relevant questions and answers into the app.

I routinely fly 91/91K/135 on the same airplane. So why are my oxygen, lifejacket, and emergency equipment requirements different based on the passenger in the back?

Aloha, George Read.

In the software business, when a large, unwieldy legacy system get too outdated, the only way to modernize it is to create a parallel track effort to do a ground-up “re-write” of the system, using functionality as a guide to drive the new design, and using the old / current system as a algorithmic guide, but create a new software architecture, and implement in a modern language. The same solution can and should apply to the FARs.

The FARs have evolved over many years as a patchwork of regulations, most of which were created in response to accidents after which the agency determined that rule changes would be much more effective than education, rather than following any coherent structure of reason. As such, not only is there no overall structure or cohesiveness to the regulations, but in numerous instances, one section of regs may actually be in conflict with another, leaving much gray area for FSDO and lawyers to argue over.

The time has most decidedly come for a “ground up” rewrite of the the entire FARs, which should accomodate the large tectonic shifts that have occurred in airframe materials and manufacturing, avionics, weather analysis, forecast, and decision making, flight and business operations, medical science, and even human aging itself.

While the current FARs can serve as a valuable reference, a small but effective “rules standards” committee made up of FAA flight standards and industry leaders needs to be formed to architect a meaningful and supportable outline of a new set of regulations. Upon completion of the outline and passing of an NPRM review, it should then be submitted for detailed regulatory formulation by competent and RATIONAL writers.

…and let’s see if we can get this done by next week, shall we?

As for the AIM, a re-organizing would be nice. Things like LORAN and NDB’s are becoming outdated. I still believe access to this information would be nice and I believe the way to fix this would be for ASA to just not publish that part of the AIM in their next revision of their book. All of the FAA’s publications are available for free online so there shouldn’t be any real issue with access these publications in their entirety if need be.

It sounds like people have an issue with the book being too thick… this is easily solved by ASA cutting out parts that are out of date from the AIM. I don’t see the FAA ever cutting parts of the regs out. ASA has already determined what is pertinent to us as pilots and has published those parts in their version of the FAR/AIM book.