Relax. I haven't had time to address your concerns about my "diverse" comment because I was working aircraft accidents over the past few days. My priority was those accidents, not addressing your picking of the word 'diverse' from my post and making it into some sort of massive excuse for how the FAA conducts business.
My point wasn't that your aircraft or pilot certificate were diverse depending on where you lived. My point was that in Juneau, Alaska, they will handle things differently than in Des Moines, Iowa. They have to. The country is different...in geography and demographics.
You SHOULD NOT get 11 different answers from 10 different FSDOs when you ask about mounting a GoPro camera on your aircraft. But it wouldn't surprise me if you did. Have you ever read FAA Order 8900? It's the guidance given to Inspectors on how to do our job. It's not a precise, black and white document. I believe purposefully so. It allows for Inspectors to handle each situation on its merits. This is one reason why people receive different answers.
I am not ignorant that different FSDOs do things differently. Neither is the FAA. But it's not as easy of a fix as we'd all like to believe, to instantly eliminate personalities, cultures, etc. to make us all robots so we can give the same answer every time. It'd be great if we could provide the same answer no matter which FSDO you contacted, but that's not reality...for a variety of reasons.
You seem very angry. I hope everything is OK.
Not angry. But that's a lame attempt at emotional cover. (Fairly common these days. Even if I were angry, so what? I pay for the poor "service". It's inappropriate for an employee to demand the boss not be upset at poor performance, but government worship and the resulting attitude of "it's ok, they're just incompetent" is rampant in our society's attitude these days.)
The nature of large bureaucracy is to declare mediocrity "good enough" and to keep going.
I didn't "pick" the word. You did. I see you've back pedaled into "a variety of reasons" now instead.
Think any of my customers might be bothered if I said my business was jacked up for "a variety of reasons" for decades on end?
Oh right. They'd find a different vendor.
Guess I don't have that option so... I suppose I should just accept it?
Or, since you're operating on borrowed money and not what I'm paying anyway (no such thing as a balanced Federal budget... man I want that deal for my business!), is the whole point of me having to pay as much as I do, part of the way to make me have skin in the game so I say, "wow, that sucks"? Loudly?
I fought pretty hard to make sure FAA got out from being funded by CR. Quite a bit of effort. The bad assumption was that a real budget would help clean up some of those "variety" of reasons and move priorities back to customer service instead of infighting. It guess it didn't, and was a mistake on my part.
Best possible outcome now is to let it expire and squeeze the budget again. Leadership and priorities seem to only come out during times when the resources are way too tight to mess around. Not even sure that's true, when the head guy is (was) a drunk.
Thanks for doing what you do, but the problems are way above your level and systemic.
No other government organization that writes regulations says, "We don't know what we meant to write into our rulebook, no one is using a consistent rulebook continuously updated as things change, nor can we change it to match what we intended. Write our lawyer and they'll take care of it with an opinion letter that carries the weight of law."
LOL. Sad. I have to get up in the morning and do what customers want and respond to their questions in a timely manner. If the question is going to come up again, I document and share the answer across colleagues immediately. No point in wasting resources and people's time researching it 20 times.
And the camera question just being one of many as just an example of how that is not the FAA's internal attitude. I specifically provided it because that's one that is no different in Juneau than in San Diego. And there's plenty more like that.
Why invest in an organization that takes no interest in efficiency? Out here where there's a budget, we'd be dead and gone in a year.
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