There is a lot of speculation and hype about the agenda and outcome of this topic. Walter and I attended the recent FAA / AeroNav meetings in Maryland. This was really a brainstorming meeting for the Industry to get to gether and help craft a few options to reduce AeroNav's liabilities due to reduced funding and new legislation charging them to become self-sustaining. They basically need to recover the costs of gathering, maintaining and distributing chart data. The recent trend of eCharts is having an effect on the paper charts production and sales, which is the majority of their revenues.
There are many topics and terms needing more clarification before things can really move forward. What constitutes a user? What is the eChart subscriber base, real numbers? Would a user be able to print or just view only. This doesn't get into the topic and lack of Copyright on charts or plates. Each one of these topic can dramatically reduce the initial user figure of $150 that the FAA has floated out there. We and others greatly challenged this initial proposal of ideas and it was apparent that this idea would not hold up.
At the end of the day, there was no final proposal nor was a resolution reached. However, many of us from the industry got together and championed several solutions for the leadership of AeroNav and the FAA to review further. The FAA and AeroNav are open and flexible, they just need to get the end result. Their prepared "Press Release" was revised to eliminate any details on user or license fees as there was just not enough progress to comment on.
This is going to take some time to be revised, vetted through the public, and for any changes to be made to the distribution sector. For the time being, it's business as usual. As always, we will keep you informed of any additional information that is made available to us.