On May 12th Marc Cook, editor of Kitplanes magazine, conducted and online interview with EAA’s Tom Charpentiere, EAA Government Relations Director, and Sean Elliott, EAA Vice President of Advocacy and Safety. The subject of the interview is the recently released draft proposal from the EAA to, as an option rather than the time-based test period, provide a task-based approach to experimental amateur-built (E-AB) aircraft phase I flight testing.

The draft proposal was open for public comments until April 29th of this year. The FAA will now have to look at each comment, make a decision on the applicability of the comment and then incorporate the comment into the final rule or provide a reason why the comment is not applicable or already addressed. A semi-educated guess would be that this process will take 6-9 months and result in the final rule being published in the Spring of 2021. The final rule is to be incorporated into a section or revision of AC 90-89B – Amateur-Built Aircraft and Ultralight Flight Testing Handbook.

The interview, recorded via Zoom is shown below, running about 24 minutes.