Expecting the FAA to Make Any Sense is Like Expecting Congress to Do Its Job

The FAA is mulling over whether or not to let some angle-of-attack indicators be installed in small airplanes without a Supplemental Type Certificate.

Mostly, the FAA is not in favor of it. They want the AOA manufacturers to get STCs.

This makes no sense. It's pretty hard to find anyone who is familiar with AOA indicators who doesn't think that they're the best safety addition to aircraft since shoulder harnesses. The mantra of carrier pilots is "meatball (glideslope), lineup, angle-of-attack". If you fly with the AOA in the green, you won't stall out. Which means that in a landing pattern, you won't get into the "stall-spin-crash-burn-die" cycle.

But hey, the FAA says that the files must be papered. Doesn't matter how many people die. The AOA makers aren't going to get STCs for airplanes that don't have thousands of candidates.

This is reminsicent of the FAA's former insistence that one had to have an STC or field approval to install retrofit shoulder harnesses. Eventually, it got through the FAA's extremely dense collective skull that a hell of a lot of people were getting killed or horribly disfigured because older airplane didn't have shoulder harnesses and the reason the owners didn't install them was because the FAA was making it almost impossible to do so. Because when you ask for a "field approval", that goes to the local Flight Standards District Office. The responsible guy in the Fairbanks FSDO might say: "Hey, this is a good idea, do it" while the throwback in the Jackson office might have taken the position that "if they were meant to be installed, Bill Piper would have installed them". (Names of FSDOs pulled at random, so STFU.)

If AOA indicators are a good idea, let's let owners fucking install them.