The FAA works on an honor system. If they chased people around looking for violations and fining people (which apparently they used to do) then people would try to circumvent detection, or avoid declaring an emergency and end up creating a bigger one.
They need transparency for things to improve, so they expect you to self report and they bring the hammer down if you don’t by hitting you where it hurts: right in the flight certifications.
From what I’m seeing it looks like Virgin didn’t self report before the news folks got wind and the FAA heard it through the grapevine, so they’ll get a big fat wake up call, and if that doesn’t get their attention then things will get much worse for them. Or, this is just SOP and an angle that sells ads and so it’s being hyped while nothing particularly egregious is happening from the FAA’s point of view.
Unusually for federal agencies, the FAA actually reversed course on this behavior and generally just tries to come down on egregious cases. People are encouraged to report on safety slips and near-misses using NASA as an unbiased intermediary. They've been known to be lenient towards minor negligence (ie. unintentional mistakes, airspace/runway incursions, etc) if the pilot recognized it and reported on it for the sake of providing stats for policy decisions.
All that said, more recently where the FAA has stopped, insurance has picked up. Insurance companies have been quick to jump on the availability of more sophisticated flight recording/tracking and the prevalence of social media to enforce their own views on aviation safety. Rates have been skyrocketing and it's becoming much harder to insure anything that isn't a simple fixed tricycle gear utility category certified 2-4 seater.
But then the checklist for pre flight is supposed to scare you into compliance, and that all these rules were created because it had cost someone blood. Many seasoned pilots blood too.
While this is off topic, from the original post and my reply - just confirming that inspectors at small aviation airports are very, very rare.
The only example I can think of is Microsoft and Apple alerting each other’s legal teams when defectors of the other try to sell secrets.
Did you mean NTSB?
This logic is how everything gets ruined.
You have a system which has caused air travel to have two orders of magnitude fewer fatalities than ground travel despite operating at much higher speeds, but the system doesn't prevent 100.0% of the evil.
Then the instance it didn't prevent is used to justify tightening the screws, even if that makes things less rather than more safe for the reasons discussed.
But like [1], I am still utterly confused about the whole self-certification deal.
The point of honor system isn't to put swift immediate justice on every infraction. It is to eliminate dishonest players from the long game.
If you are dishonest it usually is your modus operandi. You are not dishonest just once. When you get away with something once it becomes easier the next time.
But, as we say in Poland, lies have short legs. If you lie long enough you are bound to be caught one way or another.
The honor system means that once you get caught the punishment will be disproportionately painful, to make it impractical to be dishonest in the long run and to deter others from doing the same.
Now they're going to lose their status.
> An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed that Virgin Galactic “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance” and that an “investigation is ongoing.”
So I don't know where that whole narrative of the article causing the action is coming from. The investigation was already ongoing and it seems highly unlikely that bureaucrats rush something within 24 hours just because of an article in the newyorker.
From their perspective, the flight went off course for 2 mins, and they're looking for the proximate cause. They're looking for a specific safety issue, not any underlying generalized sense of a rotten safety culture at the company.
The acute problem might lead directly to a bigger general issue, if there's some direct evidence of fudged risk analysis or some specific, similar, overtly wrong behavior.
But more likely, it'll just be: we misjudged how it would handle that specific wind and were blown off course. Or something similar.
ETA: Has it even been established that the warning light/entry angle was the cause of or directly related to the airspace violation?
Other than the new yorker author's assumption?
But you're missing the bigger point.
It may have been completely unrelated to weather. By "something similar" I mean an innocent, isolated, non-cultural and non-conspiratorial explanation, that won't involve the FAA digging (or having to dig) any deeper than the superficial proximate cause.
It was a test flight of a manually piloted craft. To some extent, things will not go as expected.
Boeing and Russias last manned flights weren't manually controlled, and both had significant problems- early rocket shutdown and an unintentional, initially unstoppable thruster firing.
Yeah it needs investigating, but it's hardly unexpected or uncommon, especially for a test flight.
My sense is that, unusually among government regulators, the FAA is generally competent and cares about the real consequences of their in/action - both because the subject is life-and-death table stakes, but also because when there's a disaster the FAA itself is, by default, one of the "usual suspects". And rightly so.
Personally I see this as a very optimistic story about a regulator that actually does its job.
I've known some FAA people and they're some of the more interesting types I've come across.
Well I suppose the line of reasoning is, if here is something wrong and not according to spec, then maybe there are more critical things out of spec.
So then it seems more like responding to an article than the facts they saw on the ground
Edit: I'm being downvoted to -3 for reading the article and making an anodyne comment answering a question about it. Cool.
Also you're probably further being downvoted because whining about being downvoted is a surefire way to get downvoted.
It's simply being reported in detail now.
Control room doesn't see everything the cockpit sees. Particularly not in a pilot-centered vehicle design like Virgin Galactic's. Having a representative in the room, moreover, doesn't mean it's someone qualified to look for problems. Even if they are, it's a big room with lots going on.
> An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed that Virgin Galactic “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance” and that an “investigation is ongoing."
So this isn't a new investigation.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-red-warning-lig...
It’s even possible that the causality goes the other way: that the FAA’s movement toward a grounding was the spur for sources to reach out to a reporter.
"FAA safety engineer goes public to slam the agency’s oversight of Boeing’s 737 MAX"
Getting any small problem to have as much publicity as possible? Yeah, sounds about right.
Pretty sure an anomaly like this would not be happening if space didn't get commercial attention.
Did you know, for example, that every bird collision, no matter how small the bird was, has to be registered as a flight incident and investigated? Or that every TCAS warning is a flight incident too, even if everyone knew exactly what was going on and there was no real danger? And I do not think it's wrong, you hit a bird every blue moon and you get extra hour or a few hours of paperwork, it's okay with me. The point is they're very detailed.
[1] - https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/international/bilatera...
"FAA safety engineer goes public to slam the agency’s oversight of Boeing’s 737 MAX"