PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE By James A. Viola Being in the Thick of It Creates
Additional Risk HAI is here to help.
I
James A. Viola is HAI’s president and CEO. After a career as a US Army aviator, he joined the FAA, where he
served as director of the Office of General Aviation Safety
Assurance before joining HAI. A dual-rated pilot, Jim holds
ATP ratings in both airplanes and helicopters and is a CFII. Jim can be contacted at
president@rotor.org.
HAVE SAID BEFORE AND IT BEARS REPEATING: HAI has a duty to protect the future of our industry by ensuring its safety. It’s a duty we take seriously. We have faced threats to our safety and economic security before, but right now there is one that we are working
hard to mitigate. What would our modern VTOL industry be without satellites? Currently, the airspace where
we operate is made safer by this industry’s use of airwaves—the radio frequency spectrum in which GPS and satellite communications with the ground operate. But a flawed decision by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to accept a single company’s plan could put all of that at risk. The Ligado Networks proposal seeks to establish a cellular network that uses the same block of airwaves used by GPS and satellites that support air-to-ground communications. Repeated testing demonstrates that the towers and handsets from this new network would interfere with GPS and satellite communications. Interference in this case does not
mean slower Wi-Fi or an occasional dropped cell phone call. It means less- safe rotorcraft operations, riskier airline travel, the disruption of critical weather monitoring and reporting systems, and the degradation of emergency communications. And it will be expensive.
HAI members operate right in the
thick of it, at low altitudes, often in close proximity to flight obstructions and where there could be dense deployments of towers and potentially millions of Ligado handsets in operation. Aircraft could potentially experience repeated loss of GPS and air-to-ground communications, right when they need it most. This loss of navigational reliability caused by Ligado’s plan would increase crew workload and significantly raise the risk of an air accident. But beyond that, replacing GPS and satellite communications equipment will be expensive, driving up costs and erecting barriers to our industry’s work in infrastructure, health care, agriculture, and public safety, to name
8 ROTOR JUNE 2021
HAI President and CEO James Viola (second from left) and HAI Chair Stacy Sheard (second from right) listen as Sen. James Inhofe spearheads congressional opposition to the Ligado Order’s negative impact on the reliability of GPS and satellite communications.
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