Describing the hundreds of pages of documentation associated with the agency’s recent reauthorization, “It’s just a lot; the volume is the issue, not the individual provisions,” FAA associate administrator for aviation safety David Boulter said yesterday during the opening session at the NATA Air Charter Summit in Oklahoma City. He termed reauthorization as an “every-five-year opportunity” and noted that many of the items were “holdovers from other reauthorizations, so really some of that is on us.”

Boulter also addressed the recent proposed changes to DOT Part 380 operations, which would sever 380 regulations from the Section 110 definitions and would convert some Part 135 operators to Part 121, which engendered more than 55,000 public comments. When the NPRM was issued, he said the Part 135 segment was experiencing “an accident rate that was unacceptable. Now a lot has changed and, frankly, in the 135 space the accident rate has been declining over the years, so we need to look at actual data.”

Thus, the agency intends to empower a safety risk panel of industry observers over the next several weeks.

Because the summit venue of Oklahoma City is also home to the FAA’s aircraft registry unit, Boulter noted that the agency is actively working to reduce the time for aircraft registrations, which until recently could take nearly 200 days to process.