FAA-- "Feds Against Aviation"

I stopped by the FBO at my home airport earlier this summer. The woman at the desk was typing something up on the computer, which I've rarely seen her do before. So I asked, out of idle curiosity, what she was doing. She said she was typing up a "business case" for selling charts. I noted that they already sold charts.

Well, it seems that the jolly bastards at the FAA are going to stop distributing charts to every chart seller that does not do at least $5,000 in volume each year. Which most small airports do not.

The standard VFR chart is a "sectional chart". They cost about eight or nine bucks a pop and they come out twice a year. Most pilots who don't do a lot of cross-country flying need only the local sectional. They might also buy the local regional Airport and Facility Directory for about six bucks; the A/FD is published every two months or so. If you fly near a big city, you may need a chart of the local Class B area, what was formerly known as a TCA Chart, for about another six bucks or so.

That's not a lot of stuff, $56- $70 or so. You'd need a hundred active local pilots who keep everything current in order to make the FAA's minimum and, to be frank about it, a lot of guys don't bother. It's not like the airports move around the map and if you do a computerized briefing before each flight, you'll catch the changes. A lot of the chart purchases come from pilots at the airports who see the rack of charts and realize that they need one or two.

The FAA, obviously, wants to push people to using the online chart retailers. I don't think that is good, as it just means that more people will be flying around with outdated charts. That's almost too much of a common-sense conclusion for the FAA, I guess.