“Donald Trump’s Jet, a Regular on the Campaign Trail, Isn’t Registered to Fly” is a nytimes story on the expired registration for a Cessna Citation X owned by a shell corporation in Delaware. The registration is expired, something that would have been impossible until recently. The FAA changed the rules in 2010 so that registrations are now good for only three years whereas before they were valid until modified by the owner or a new buyer. Apparently the typical American worker simply can’t handle the new requirements, as evidenced by Angelina Jolie’s Cirrus debacle and this latest one with Trump and his staff.
I’m wondering if historians will look back on this moment as a tipping point when the ability of Americans to generate regulations outstripped the practical ability of Americans to comply with regulations.
[Readers might legitimately point out that car registrations expire and people somehow manage to get them renewed. However, the sight of the Massachusetts State Police towing away cars that lack current stickers from the side of the Interstate, leaving families stranded, is not uncommon. And even if in theory Americans should be able to comply with a regulation like this it seems worth looking at actual ability.]
Don’t we already have to renew tag registrations on our cars every year?
So… I’m not sure having to renew an N registration every three years is too onerous.
After Fairfax police ticket cars awaiting state inspection, Va. passes law banning it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/07/after-fairfax-police-ticket-cars-awaiting-state-inspection-va-passes-law-banning-it/
Javier: It probably isn’t “too onerous” for someone in Japan or Germany. But Americans have demonstrated an inability to cope with this. And actually you’re providing a great example of American thinking! You sit at a computer considering that, in the abstract, it should not be difficult for Americans to do X. So a regulation is promulgated requiring that they do X as a prerequisite to engage in economic activity. Yet unfortunately it turns out that Americans are not in fact organized enough to do X. So we have $10 million airplanes grounded.
philg: of all the things that I have to do to remain current, keep the plane airworthy, etc., renewing the registration with the FAA scores really, really low. Maybe set up a periodic reminder on your phone/computer/whatever you use for calendar?
We can take it further… how are Mr. Trump’s flight crews staying current on their medicals and recurrent training? How are they keeping up with the required inspections? Currency on the charts and navigation databases? They should add a “renew registration” item to that checklist.
Tangentially related: last year, I noticed two well known IT companies letting the SSL certificates on some of their Internet-facing servers expire (Google and Twitter).
I think some of the commenters are missing the point that the FAA changed the rules, as you pointed out. It doesn’t surprise me at all that aircraft owners might not remember to do something that wasn’t previously required. It sounds like when the rules were changed, the FAA didn’t put a system in place to notify owners when it is time to renew; or if they did, that whoever got the notice dropped the ball, possibly because they weren’t aware of the new requirement and didn’t think it was important, or maybe it went to the wrong person/place in the Trump organization and was ignored.
In Colorado, the county sends out a renewal notice every year when it’s time to renew auto registrations. Speaking only for myself, that was something I relied on. One year I didn’t get the notice for one of my cars and only became aware of it when it came time to file my federal income taxes and I discovered that I didn’t have a copy of the car registration for that car so I could enter the deductible ownership tax (all of $3.00!) into TurboTax. By that time the renewal was about eight months overdue. I promptly went to the local county clerk’s office to make it right. Since then I’ve added annual recurring reminders in Calendar on my Mac so I won’t ever forget to renew the registration on my cars whether I get the county reminder notice or not. I’d be willing to bet that someone in the Trump organization will do the same for the aircraft fleet going forward.
In the late 1980ies I wrote a program for a Transputer (Inmos T4) in Occam. Transputers were great for parallel execution. Unfortunately I was not a great programmer and my programs/threads running in parallel always ended up in a deadlock. The complexity of synchronization was too much for me.
I guess it is similar for the lawmakers/regulators – just not as obvious. The intentions are good but reality bites.
The BER airport in Berlin, Germany is six years behind schedule despite being pretty much ready in 2010. Acceptance is not granted due to certain building law violations. I guess that several of the building laws are actually contradicting each other and therefore you can never get acceptance unless you bribe the organization doing the acceptance.
A friend of mine was involved in building a very small church run kindergarten and the construction came to a standstill two years ago since two “subject matter experts” responsible for the acceptance of the building were in disagreement. Probably both were right and their requirements were contradicting each other. If you can’t lawfully build a small kindergarten how can you build an airport?
Lawmakers can create deadlocks. Unlike hitting “recompile” it takes decades to change the laws. And I was doing many, many recompile runs …
At a certain point the system becomes too complex to handle for humans. It’s not always a deadlock but too many laws and regulations will bring activities to an unintended standstill.
All great ideas, Javier, that you can supply to the folks who work for Mr. Trump and Ms. Jolie.
How much would companies pay for a service that lets you enter an N-number, and it will email them reminders when you’re getting close to expiration?
philg: ok, get me the guy on the phone, and I’ll give him some pointers.
Not certain of the problem. I received a written notice in the mail that my helicopter’s registration was expiring. I went online and renewed in less than five minutes.
I think it cost $5.00.
Also, I don’t recall seeing Trump in an X, Phil.
He typically arrives in a Boeing.
Mark – the article explains that there are many smaller airports on the campaign trail that will not accommodate a Boeing.
It also explains that the FCC sent the renewal notice but it was to some sort of dummy registered agent dropbox for the LLC that owns the aircraft. This is a very common arrangement. Any Delaware entity (and Delaware is a popular corporate domicile) is legally required to have an “office” in Delaware to receive service of process in lawsuits, etc. Most states have similar laws. The registered agent (who makes between $50 and $300 per company per year for providing this service), is the “office” for hundreds or thousands of companies. If it receives a notice from a third party it is supposed to forward that notice to the company’s real address . Either the registered agent dropped the ball or else it was dropped on Trump’s end – a notice could easily be mistaken for junk mail.
what is the purpose of aircraft registration? why have it at all?
Toucan Sam: I guess the government wants to know whom to blame if something goes wrong. But your question also motivates me to ask why if the century-old paper+mail system was being re-thought to have an expiration date they didn’t rethink the physical paper and U.S. Mail part as well.
Phillip,
Don’t forget how many new middle jobs with lifetime pensions processing the registrations has created.
And then many more following up on, and prosecuting the offenders, and then collecting the fines
Phil, not to bog you down in endless debate but I think your conclusion “whom to blame if something goes wrong” is false. When something does go wrong a government investigation is conducted and usually there is plenty of blame to go around. From pilots, to mechanics, components etc. etc. I don’t think the registration helps the investigators at all! (but that is just a guess) Thinking it does is like thinking not filing a flight plan caused a crash. Likely the bureaucracy that is created can not be supported by 5 dollars every few years. Perhaps it is a low “introductory” price.
As I recall, the registration-renewal requirement was part of the fall-out from 9/11. It had something to do with the fact that under the old register-just-once regulation, there were countless planes whose current owners couldn’t be identified.