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HOW NASA CAN ASSIST THE FAA Charles R. Foster Director, Northwest Region Federal Aviation Administration Neal 3lake and I will both address the issue of assistance from NASA as far as the FAA is concerned. I thought it might be wise for me to discuss the background for this presentation, both mine and his, starting with the mission of the FAA, what we are about, and where and how we are going. As you know, one of the major areas where NASA can participate with the FAA deals with our charter for the development aad growth of civil aviation, as well as for providing and maintaining the highest level of safety in air transportation. We can break that responsibility into a couple of different areas, one dealing with the management of the navigable air space, or the air traffic sideâand Neal will be discussing more of that than Iâand the other side of the issue having to do with the aircraft and the aircraft operations. I would like to spend my time dealing primarily with some of the issues relative to those two elements. First, in the aircraft, we start with the actual design of the vehicle, how it is manufactured, and how it is maintained. We group these three together, and we identify all of them with the airworthiness of the vehicle. So, we have a major role in the airworthiness of the vehicle, both initially as well as on a continuing basis. In the operational area we are dealing with the flying of the vehicle. That includes the procedures that we use, the training of the crew members, the types of people we have aboard the airplane, the numbers we have, the human factors, how they interrelate, the individual, and the machine itself. This we lump into our operational side of the house. So, airworthiness and operations are two major areas where NASA has been able to contribute to the FAA's overall mission in the past as well as today. It is interesting to note that NACA, which came into being in l9l5, had a budget of $5000. In NASA, today, the budget is about ll9
$5 billion. That is quite a jump from 5000 to 5 billion in this time span. I am sure that in l9l5 if anyone had projected the most you would ever see in any budget for any government agency the word "billions" would not even have been used. A person's judgment would have been questioned if he had predicted as much as a million dollars for an agency engaged in aeronautical research. One of the issues is how and where the aeronautical part of this budget should be spent. I have heard several people here discuss the issue of fundamental, or pure, research. There are some who question whether NASA should go beyond that into the development of technology, even into operational feasibility; in other words, what part of the spectrum of aeronautical research should be done by NASA? In addressing this issue for the l980s, we should not focus strictly on NASA and NASA alone as if there, and there alone, is where the research is going to be done. In my dealings with the Office of Management and Budget many times in the past, when we would ask for funds for research, the general question we would get would be whether this is not something that NASA should be doing. So, we would have to justify why it was something that the FAA or some other part of the Department of Transportation should be doing, even though the generic term may apply across the board to NASA, the Department of Defense, and others. So, if we are not careful we can wind up having the research identified with one organization such that there may be, because of administrative procedures and processes, an inability to get the funds or resources equitably distributed according to the priorities that we see as far as the value of the research products. I will address, first of all, transport aircraft. You have heard some excellent speeches dealing with our role in the transport aircraft business, where we stand today, the challenges we have, the leadership we have had in the past, what we need to do, and where we should go to maintain the leadership for the future. I think that the area of rotorcraft is one that has not received the attention it should have in the past. In the FAA I think that we have all too often dealt with the field of aircraft, and 99 percent of the time we think of airplanes. We have put out regulations that, once they were in the field, people have questioned whether we really meant for them to apply to helicopters. The answer was, goodness no, we were not thinking about helicopters, we were thinking about airplanes. We have not addressed the requirements for rotorcraft with the saoie priority and resources that have been given to airplanes. For example, in the area of icing, I think it is unfortunate or worse than unfortunate that we have foreign governments that have certification criteria for icing of rotorcraft and we do not have them in the United States. This is a case, I think, where we have not done the kind of research that we should have done in the past or we would have had the information necessary for us to develop these kinds of certiftcaton criteria. Commuter aircraft. As you may know, the FAA certificate aircraft according to type. We have the categories broken down in which we have specific Federal Aviation Regulations. They are divided into l20
different parts for different categories of aircraft. For example, Parts 27 and 29 deal with rotorcraft. Part 23 deals with utility, acrobatic, and light aircraft. Part 25 deals with transport category aircraft. We have been working for about 4 or 5 years to determine whether or not we need to put out a new part, a Part 24, for aircraft that are between the smaller general aviation category and the heavy transport category. Why have we been spending this time on Part 24? Because we feel there is a requirement to develop an aircraft that is really designed to satisfy the commuter market. Unfortunately, most of the aircraft that are designed for the commuter market and sold in the United States are not manufactured here nor are they designed here. The aircraft that fit into this market are those that have been developed for business executive aviation or general aviation and have been expanded or modified to fill the gap. Here is an area where, I think, we could get some input from NASA into the basic fundamentals necessary to put together a truly effective commuter aircraft. The general aviation side of the picture. I think Mai Harned made some good points dealing with that. We are killing too many people stalling and spinning aircraft. Aircraft do not have to have those kinds of characteristics. We can build airplanes that will not spin, that will not stall, and that will still perform the mission for which most people buy a private airplane. Lastly, I have to touch on my previous assignment delving into government dealings with the environment. Since I spent many years in that area, I would like to touch on a couple of things that I think NASA can assist us with in our dealing with environmental issuas, particularly as far as noise is concerned. Across the spectrum of types of aircraft, one of the areas that has been discussed here and will continue to be discussed at some length has to do with composite materials. We are developing information about composite materials and are employing composite materials in some of our aircraft today. It was interesting to hear Gerry Tobias* comment regarding the percentage of the Spirit heli- copter that actually is composite, even the primary structures. We need to know more about how we are going to certificate composite materials. We need to know more about the damage tolerability of composite materials. What are the effects on the environment in which these materials will operate? What happens after 5 years, l0 years, or l5 years? What kind of nondestructive testing can we have? How can we be sure, both in the initial devslopment testing and in the proving of the product, that it is safe and meets the criteria as well as the continued airworthiness of vehicles using composite materials? I think that we have not properly addressed all of these areas, and I think many times we spend too much effort, as far as the FAA is concerned, on identifying unique characteristics on too small a scale. Obviously, we would like to see the work in aerodynamics and control of aircraft continued. One of the concerns we have today has to do with transsonic flutter analysis, particularly shock-induced flutter that can be developed on some of our supercritical wing airfoils. Active controls. We are making some progress in active controls. l2l
We feel that further research needs to be done in this area. One of the Largest areas is the huaian factors work. We are moving in the area where we are having more and more things done in a cockpit, either through mechanical means and/or electronics. As the airplane cockpit becomes more complex we are able to handle more things automatically. The big question is how to resolve the work load problem to make sure that we do not put so much in the cockpit, so many different kinds of instruments, radios, what have you, that the crew work load is not increased. It is interesting to note that we have gone from crews with as many as 4 and 5 members, l0 to l6 years ago, down to 2 and 3 today. The important thing is being able to quantify how we can reduce this work load by the development and interface of various electronic and mechanical pieces of equipment. Another area that we need to improve is the propulsion system, particularly for transport aircraft. We have had quite a few discussions dealing with various types of modification and improvement of existing turbo machiners, development of new types, new and different kinds of fuels, and new means of propulsion. I would like to throw out one subject that has not been coveredâ that is the reliability of our new propulsion systems. In the early days of the DC-4s, DC-6s, Constellations, and Stratocrusiers, we had airplanes that had four reciprocating engines. In those days, the engine failure rate was running around 400 and 500 flight hours per engine shutdown. Along comes the turbojet and we hardly ever have an engine failure. Actually, most of the turbojets are removed because of time limits. In the days of predominantly four-engine airplanes, we had aircraft land with one engine shut downâsometimes two engines shut down. I think the 747 will be the last large four-engine aircraft built. We are moving more and more toward two- and three-engine aircraft. Our newest, latest aircraft are coming out with two large high-bypass-ratio engines. So, as we delve into the means of improving the specifics, reducing the weight and many other factors that deal with the propulsion system, we must also make sure that we provide adequate attention and time to the reliability of these machines. Two-engine failure of a twin-engine airplane is entirely different from two-engine failure on a three- or four-engine airplane. Lastly, I would like to comment on the environmental concern. We have moved from the arena in noise where we were, I guess l5 years ago or so, really trying to find the fundamentals of how noise was generated; what were the mechanisms involved particularly in the jet exhaust? We were developing means of suppressing the noise or modifying the design so that the noise was not generated. And we have made tremendous progress. Unfortunately, we still have a lot of aircraft with old engines that will be flying over the next 5 or l0 years that will not incorporate a lot of the technology that we have developed and applied to the newly produced airplanes. As we have moved from concentrating on the source of the noise in our propulsion systems, we are now in the area of major legal issues, l22
and people are going to court because of the noise exposure they are receiving. In California, the airports are now paying compensation for noise nuisance, and indications are that the recipients can go back and back if the nuisance is not remove-d. As this spreads across the country the impact could be devastating on our whole transporta- tion system. One of the problems that I see in this is the method for deter- mining what the noise exposure is. We have some very sophisticated noise map or noise contour modeling procedures both within the Depart- ment, the Air Force, NASA, and other places. NASA has a large facility at Langley that is working on this particular problem. The computer program will io an excellent job of taking the input and drawing out all these contours. The courts take the contours and determine what the noise may be or should be. But, if you go out and start measuring around these contours to validate the contours through measurements, you find one of the fundamental problems we have and that is our ability to truly predict what the sound pressure level is going to do, the content of the sound, as it propagates over long distances. This is a long time, I think, for an expensive type of research that needs to be completed. We still have limited results from research dealing wth this long-range propagation of sound. Over the last l5 years, I think we have made tremendous progress in aircraft noise reduction. So, dealing with the aircraft and its operations, I have indicated the types of aircraft (transport, helicopters, commuter, and general aviation) for which I feel we need input from NASA to assist us in modifying our regulations and developing new criteria. Composite materials, aerodynamics, human factors, propulsion, and the environ- ment are the five areas that I felt would be worthwhile mentioning and highlighting at this time. I would like to say, in conclusion, that these things are not all that we are interested in. l23
