Volunteer Private Pilot

[RyanB]

Let’s say you’re a PPL and you have been asked to fly a friend to a specified location. Your gas is paid for by donations to the fuel dealer (to you it's free) and all they need is a pilot.

So are you legal?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

The FAA has been quite liberal in interpreting what is considered "compensation" for flying.

Of course, because that maximizes their domain of operation and the size of their budget. SOP for regulatory agencies.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I sincerely doubt that the FAA has a lot of time on their hands, or significant budgetary largesse to be gained by enforcing pilot compensation rules. That's just hyperbolic paranoia.

Pretty well documented behavior of regulatory agencies in general. You get a larger budget and a bigger salary by having a larger staff, which you get by having more and more rules to enforce. Sort of true for large departments in for-profit companies as well, but there the bottom line limits that sort of thing.

I'm sure that from any particular staffers point of view, they are just trying to enforce the rules and improve safety. The problem in general with this type of thing is, there are usually unintended consequences of any set of rules, which may act contrary to the initial intention. I am not aware of any actual data that the FAA's prohibition of of people flying others for incidental compensation improves the safety of flight. (Would be happy to see references to same if posted.)

There's a tradeoff between achieving the intended effect, stopping dangerous pilots from setting up shop and hurting people, and other unintended ways this could hurt safety. Some of those might be things like increasing the cost of flying thereby decreasing people's use of a safer mode of transportation, flying, and using a more dangerous one, like driving. Alternately, these prohibitions might decrease the use of GA generally, thereby driving up the price of aircraft and safety equipment, and resulting in actually more accidents overall. The world is a complex place and it is hard to predict the actual outcomes. That's why actual studies of effects are needed, rather than regulation by knee jerk reaction, which is largely what we have now.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

FAA motto - We're not happy until you're not happy.
Where did this come from? Try the day the music died.

Is that true? Was the pilot in that crash not a commercial pilot? He was flying a charter flight to take them to the next stop on the tour and flown a fair amount for the operator previously.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

If you think the current rules are absurd, just keep working loopholes until the FAA simplifies them and takes away the privilege of a private pilot having passengers at all.

We could also try simply eliminating rule and regulatory systems which have no demonstrated positive effect on flight safety. That would be a huge simplification.

Is there any evidence that the current no compensation rule improves flight safety ? I’ve asked before and have not heard of any.

People will always look for the edges of laws and rules, that is the nature of such systems. If you think about it, there are in most cases strong economic reasons people will be incentivized to find out where the lines actually are.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

The FAA could make it really easy and just write a rule prohibiting a private pilot receiving anything of value for operating an aircraft - including cost sharing - no exceptions.

Well but even that wouldn’t simplify it that much. Then the questions would devolve to, as has been posted above, does the GF having sex with you after a flight count as something of value? Does the friend you make buying you dinner count as something of value? The list goes on and on.

No regulatory system can ever accurately anticipate all possible cases in the real world. The more rules there are, the more weird edge cases there will be.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

There is abundant evidence that private pilots flying light GA planes pose a greater risk to their passengers than do part 121 operators.

Agreed that Part 121 is a lot safer overall per mile of flight than GA flying. But that doesn't prove that the FAA regulations, and in particular, the no compensation for private pilots rule, is the cause of that. I am not aware of any evidence that would even strongly suggest that rule improves flight safety.

As I noted in my post above, regulations often have the intended and unintended effects. The latter can often undo the intended improvements. In this case, I would suggest simply eliminating the rule and carefully measuring the accident rates in both flying and other forms of transportation. Perhaps also have an education campaign to educate passengers how to distinguish safe from unsafe operators.

My suspicion is that the number of cases of people who will try and and essentially set up a for profit airline using private pilots flying airplanes will be quite small and that the number of people willing to fly on shady unsafe operations will be also quite small. Thus the number of accidents and problems caused by such people will be limited (though I imagine there would be some).

To offset that small increase in risk, potentially more people will be flying, rather than driving, and more GA airplanes will be sold or better maintained. Thus the overall safety of the traveling public might be improved. Or at least not significantly harmed.

In the meantime, the number of rules that people have to navigate is reduced, the number of edge cases is reduced, and people are a least a little marginally freer from coercion by the government.

This is speculative because the effect of regulation in the real world is often difficult to predict. Unfortunately, we have regulation by knee jerk reaction and intuition, rather than really looking at data. My general thought is, without good evidence of a positive effect, don't force people to do things they don't want to do.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Let's also consider for the moment, how market mechanisms might work to limit the number of people trying to unsafely fly people for hire when they are private pilots.

Firstly, if you own a reasonable and expensive aircraft which can provide decent service which people might want to purchase a fair amount of the time, do you want to be flying it around uninsured? I very much doubt that insurance companies, who known the odds rather well, are going to want to be insuring an unsafe private pilot sort of operation.

So then, are most passengers going to want to pay to fly around in small uninsured planes? Many people don't even want to fly in them in the first place, get airsick, etc. If one added a bit of education for the public, I suspect the vast majority of potential customers could easily become savvy enough to ask the operator if the plane was insured, check that, and even inquire whether the operator had the additional training required to be a commercial pilot.

Given those two factors, how many people are actually going to be trying to unsafely fly around other people for hire in planes they can afford to risk the equity on? Probably so few that the regulation regarding no compensation for private pilots isn't worth the costs of having and enforcing.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

I think that the regulations of part 121 are indeed the reason those operations are safer than part 91. But that wasn't my point.

But does the no compensation for private pilots regulation contribute to greater flight safety? That is the question I had asked. And I think the main point pertaining to this thread, which was about private pilots flying people somewhere and receiving benefits from doing so. Whether other part 121 regulations improve flight safety does not directly address that. Is the contention here that the no compensation rule for private pilots improves the safety of flight? If so, what's the evidence that is true?

If there is strong evidence that this rule improves flight safety and the safety of those on the ground, then I could see a possible utilitarian argument for it.

The fact is that part 121 commercial air travel is orders of magnitude safer than part 91 general aviation, and because of that fact it is politically impossible to enact a regulatory scheme that remands the issue back to the marketplace to find out how many people are willing to fly on totally unregulated airlines.

I do tend to think more about what is right than about practical politics. I tend to think that eventually what is right will win out. And I strongly believe that as individuals we should only support and advocate for what is right.

To be worth discussing, any alternative to what we have now must have at least some realistic hope of being embraced by the populace to a sufficient degree that it could become law.

As above, I tend to think it is actually more important to think about and discuss what is right, but I agree that practical political considerations are a valid approach to achieving what is right. Working in that manner is a good approach, just not one I spend a lot of time on.

Another idea might be to revise regulations to adhere to the 'being in business' standard which has a long history of litigation and decisions. That will raise in importance the question of whether a pilot is "holding themselves out" which is already part of the regulatory equation, but would allow someone to be partly paid by a friend, for example. Thus a bit more freedom. And again, one could try and actually figure out the increased risk, if any, of using that less restrictive scheme.

Honestly I don't know that the populace as a whole will ever have much interest in the details of what happens with private pilot licensing. I imagine the big political players who lobby to have things done by the FAA are the commercial airlines, who have a lot at stake.

Your theory also seems to be based on overly optimistic assumptions about human behavior and a somewhat myopic view of history.

I'm afraid that is introducing the personal characteristics of the speaker and is thus an ad hominem attack (though I don't think intended particularly meanly). Not only is that a logical fallacy, but it is in public fora, rude.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

The idea of assuming the market will self-regulate through natural selection of flights that have insurance coverage is also, I think, unrealistic. It forces passengers to internalize and analyze risks that they lack sufficient information to understand. The transaction costs of passengers obtaining and reading insurance policies to determine which flights to take are too great, and the likelihood of passengers even being sophisticated enough to care about insurance coverage when selecting flights is low. Regulations on commercial air travel make sense because they put responsibility for safety in the hands of the parties most capable of measuring safety.

I guess this is the primary place where we may differ. I think asserting that market forces working is unrealistic is an unjustified assumption. If that assumption is not correct, then I trust we would agree that perhaps we should be rid of this no compensation for private pilots rule?

So what data is there to justify this assumption? There is a large body of work on regulatory capture and the ineffectiveness of regulation to help in situations like this. This body of work directly examines the notions advanced above here regarding analysis of risk, sophistication, etc. Clearly the FAA is _not_ in a position to judge what the risk-cost tradeoffs are for individual passengers. They have no real knowledge of same and are incentivized to always err on the side of greater regulation and safety. There is a tradeoff between risk, cost, and cost of information and historically regulatory agencies are not very good or efficient at approximating what consumers in a free market will choose. I am suggesting that people look at the actual data and studies regarding this, rather than simply assuming. If there is a study or white paper relating these general ideas to FAA regulation, I would be very happy to see it.

As noted, most of the FAA regulations were adopted over the course of a century as a response to some one particular disaster or problem. That is not necessarily a rational or productive way to create a legal or regulatory environment which promotes safety. In fact, such knee jerk reactions often have the opposite from their intended effects due to unintended side effects. I am not aware of any studies which have demonstrated that the no compensation for private pilot rule enhances flight safety. That is why I keep asking essentially "where's the data" ?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Very brief search turned up the following: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2811419/

Conclusion: "No effect of the rule change on crash rates of 10–30-seat aircraft was apparent. The decline in their crash rates began before the rule change and may have been related to the 1992 requirement for ground proximity warning devices."

While not directly related to the no compensation for private pilot safety rule, I post this as an example where the assumed effects of regulation do not come to pass, and yet we bear the costs of the regulations.

As to costs, reference here to a study on increased costs due to regulation: https://news.uci.edu/2018/05/01/str...-pilots-linked-to-higher-fares-fewer-flights/

I think these examples illustrate that there is good reason to be suspicious of assumptions that FAA regulation increases safety at a reasonable cost. Where's the data that these regulations work?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

If you can show the commercial rules have no impact, then you can argue the private compensation rules should be amended.

While that is true, it is also possible that the additional training for commercial could have some impact on safety beyond the training for private pilot. I suspect it does not, but it could.

In other words, the argument that if 250 hours does not improve safety, then 40 will not seems on pretty good ground. The argument that 250 might have some safety value, therefore 40 might also seems less plausible.

Since the private pilot Part 61 minimums are only 40 hours compared to 250 hours for the commercial with a wide range of other minimum training and experience requirements, your argument is without merit.

Not sure what argument exactly you are referring to there or why the above would show it is without merit, but perhaps if you like to further that contention, more explanation would help?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Most accidents (49.1%) were conducted with individuals holding a private pilot certificate. Second in incidence were commercial pilots (28.2%), followed by Airline Transport Pilots (ATPs) (13.7%), and student pilots (5.7%) (AOPA, 2012). Private pilots represent 30.8% of certificates held but have a much higher rate of accidents (FAA, 2012).

Still unclear how that argues that the no compensation for private pilots rule improves flight safety. As noted, there are lots of reasons, including less training, that may account for a higher accident rate for private pilots. That doesn’t imply that rule has any effect. It just doesn’t follow.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

To demonstrate that a rule like the no compensation for private pilots rule works to improve the safety of flight, one has to something like the following.

Measure the safety of flight prior to the rule being in place, enact the rule, measure the safety of flight again, and show there is a difference in safety of flight afterward enactment.

Best if the change is significant, though even a non-significant change can be suggestive. And best if there are controls for other possible confounding factors, like general trends, but again that is not entirely necessary.

Is there any data like that or a study for this rule? If there isn’t, then the FAA is coercing pilots to not do what they want on the basis of a hunch or guess.