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Though these two versions of the regulations are quite similar, they do have some important differences from the perspective of an aviation law researcher. Let's start off with the features they have in common:
Though it is usually not necessary for answering a simple question of aviation law, it is sometimes helpful to look at the laws, called the "enabling legislation", that set up the roles and responsiblities of administrative bodies. The Federal Aviation Act of 1958, for example, broadly lays out what operations are within the Federal Aviation Administration's charge and generally how it should carry out its responsibilities. It leaves many of the small details up to the FAA itself, but instead lays out the "big picture" of how the FAA fits into the governmental structure. It is important to keep in mind that this is a matter of degree, however. Aviation law is quite dense with details, so even though the legislation that guides administrative agencies is supposed to leave the nuts and bolts of implementation up to the administrative body itself, there is still a lot of detail laid out by Congress when it comes to aviation, which can be a bit intimidating for a first-time researcher. Congress has even specified, for example, something as fine-grained as when an emergency locator transmitter (ELT) is required to be in an aircraft (49 USC 44712). To most people that seems pretty specific, but it is still broad in relative terms, since it is up to the FAA and NTSB, and occassionally the federal appeals courts, to determine how those conditions should be interpreted -- i.e. whether or not it should be applied in specific cases, and if so, how.
There are also a number of Congressional subcommittees whose activities often effect aviation policy, which were discussed in the section on government structure. Though some of this influence is through funding, which would not normally be relevant to an investigation of the appropriate application and interpretion of a specific aviation rule or set of rules, there a number of cases in which the statutes produced by Congress could be quite important to an aviation law research project. The Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994, for example, is a piece of legislation that has had an extremely powerful influence on the aviation industry. If you were to be involved in an accident and were attempting to determine whether the manufacturer of the aircraft you were flying could be held liable for the accident, it would be a good idea for you to research that act. And doing so thoroughly would require you to have an understanding of the various publications that arise from a given piece of legislation.
When Congress passes a new law, it moves through several stages of publication. The first form is called a "slip law." This is a copy of the individual statute as it was enacted and is identified by a public law number, which reflects the session of the legislature in which the law was passed as well as the order of passage during that session. Pub.L. No. (public law number) 105-100, for example, would be the 100th statute enacted by the 105th Congress.
An extremely useful source of legislative activity, especially when it is too recent to have appeared in one of the sources discussed later, is the Congressional Record, which is printed by the Government Printing Office on a daily, over-night basis and then bound after the end of the Congressional session. Each such sessions spans two years of Congressional activity, and as of the date of this web sites creation, we are in the 105th. Since each day's edition currently averages about 272 pages, the publications that arise from an entire session are voluminous, to say the least. Both the House and Senate produce their own Journals that serve as the official sources of legislative activity, but the Congressional Record is much more accessible and easy to use for research purposes.
Since 1947, each day's Congressional Record contains a Daily Digest in the back, which lists the day's activities by chamber, including the number of bills introduced, the floor actions taken that day, a summary of meetings held that day by committees and for what purpose, and a list of committee meetings scheduled for the next day and on what topics. The Congressional Record contains more material than would be present in a strict transcript of the day's floor activities, since Senators and Representatives often ask for, and are almost always granted, a truncated reading of a bill or amendment, which leaves out many vital details. The full text of those documents is reproduced in the Congressional Record, and legislators are allowed to grammatically revise and extend their remarks, so the text is more readable and informative than a transcript would be.
The Congressional Record contains four sections:
There are two editions of the Record, a daily one and a bound, permanent one. As previously noted, the daily edition reports each day's proceedings in Congress and is published on the succeeding day. Periodically, throughout a session, indices to the daily Record are published. The permanent edition differs somewhat from the daily edition. Its text is somewhat edited, revised and rearranged. The pagination is continuous for each session; but there is no H, S, or E before each page number. There is a volume number for each session and numerous parts to each volume. The final two volumes of the permanent Record of each session are an index containing a history of bills and resolutions and a compilation of Daily Digests for the session. The conclusion of the latter contains a comprehensive resume of all legislative business transacted by the House and Senate during each session (at the end of odd numbered years) and a resume of all business transacted during an entire Congress (at the end of even numbered years).
Semimonthly indices and an index to the bound edition of the Record are provided. The index serves as a guide to the contents and an aid in tracing legislation. The biweekly indices cannot be used for the bound, permanent Record, nor can the bound, permanent index to a session be used for the daily Record, since the daily and bound volume paginations are not the same. The indices are composed of two parts, an index to the proceedings, which includes material in the Extensions of Remarks and is, in general, arranged by name as well as subject; and a history of bills and resolutions (for both House and Senate measures) which is arranged by bill and resolution numbers. With the index, one can locate all of the Record page references to items such as the remarks made by a particular Member, all the bills and the amendments introduced by that Member as well as follow the legislative history of legislation, such as when a measure was introduced and/or reported, debated, passed, and enacted.
Finding the Congressional Record
The Congressional Record is available in some libraries and can also be found online. Probably the most convenient online source of recent editions is Thomas, which provides the text of the following sessions:
105th (1997-98) - 104th (1995-96) - 103rd (1993-94) -- seperate engines for search by word or phrase, member of Congress, and date/date range.
You can also browse the Congressional Record Issues by date and section. Page citations and bill references in the Daily Digest are hyperlinked to the full-text Congressional Record and text of legislation databases for the 105th Congress.
The Congressional Record Index is also available for the following:
105th - 1st (1997) - 104th - 2nd (1996) - 104th - 1st (1995) - 103rd - 2nd (1994) -- includes search engine for word or phrase searching and hyperlinks to all citations.
The text of bills, the Congressional Record and Committee Reports are first processed by the Government Printing Office (GPO) before they are transmitted electronically to the Library of Congress, which makes them available for online retrieval. The Congressional Record is updated the most rapidly of the three. GPO processes a day's proceedings in the Senate and House overnight and usually transmits them to THOMAS by 9 a.m. (or earlier) the next day. THOMAS massages the data for use by its underlying vendor-supplied retrieval engine, called InQuery. The text is available online about two hours later.
The processing of bill text takes a little longer. GPO usually needs about two days to complete the work it needs to do to complete the official text and to digitize the text for transmission. In the early days of a session, usually January, the process make take longer, as a very large number of bills are introduced at the beginning of a session. Once the Library of Congress receives the text from GPO, and processes it for InQuery, it becomes available online within a few hours.
The time line for the availability of Committee Reports is less predictable. Reports are released and sent to GPO when a committee deems them ready. The Library makes the text available online in THOMAS about an hour after it arrives. However, sometimes manual adjustments are necessary which delay the availability of the text.
Many THOMAS web pages near the bottom have the notation "Last Updated" followed by a particular date. Occasionally, THOMAS users confuse this information with meaning how old the data is which they are viewing. In reality, this date does not reflect the age of the data being viewd via this web page, but rather indicates the last time that the particular web page itself was changed, e.g. the text modified or reformatted, links added, etc. The Congressional Research Sevice (CRS) of the Library of Congress prepares Bill Summary & Status information for THOMAS. Status tracking begins after a bill is reported from committee to the floor of the House or the Senate, and normally status updates and legislative history are made available the following day. Early in a session, however, the process is often slower. Many bills are never reported out of committee, and those are not tracked by the CRS staff so that little information about them is found in Bill Summary & Status.
The laws from the Congressional session are republished, again in order of enactment, in one or more volumes known as "session laws". The official publication for federal session laws is called United States Statutes at Large, and documents within it are cited by references like "72 Stat. 731", which means page 731 of volume 72 of Statutes at Large. (This reference happens to be to the Federal Aviation Act.)
Finally, the new law is codified, which means that it is integrated into the U.S. Code, which is a large body of statutes that are currently in effect, organized into 50 broad subjects called "titles." Laws that have been codified can be found through their title and section numbers. The organization and responsibilities of the FAA , for example, can be found at 49 USC 106, which means it is in the 106th section of Title 49 (Transportation) of the U.S. Code. Provisions for civil penalties are laid out in 49 USC 46301, which is in Section 1 of Chapter 463 (Penalties) of Subpart IV (Enforcement and Penalties) of Part A (Air Commerce and Safety) of Subtitle VII (Aviation Programs) of Title 49 (Transportation) of the United States Code. As you can see, the structure of the code allows for a great deal of dividing and subdividing of topics. By using an index of the code, you can pretty easily dig your way down the structure to the specific area that interests you. If you have ever used gopher to find information, you will recognize the same sort of hierarchical searching.
The following is a hierarchical presentation of some of the portions of the US Code that effect general aviation. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list but rather serves to demonstrate the basic structure of the code and how a lot of the relevant items are organized. I've left out a great deal of the structure within a section of the code in order to highlight some areas that may be of particular interest to general aviation pilots:
Print sources
The U.S. Code can be found in various locations. The most traditional place to find them is at a library that is part of the federal depository system. There are approximately 1,400 such libraries throughout the U.S. and its territories, at least one in almost every Congressional District. All provide free public access to various Federal government information in both print and electronic formats and have trained staff available to assist users. You can visit the Government Printing Office web page to find your local Federal Depository Library (search by state or area code) or contact
Judy Russell
Electronic Information Dissemination Services (EIDS)
Mail Stop SDE, U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington DC 20401
phone: 202 512-1622
fax: 202 512-1262
e-mail: jrussell@gpo.gov
In more than 20 States, users with modems can connect to GPO Access through depository library "gateways" with a local phone call. Listings of depository libraries and gateways can be found on the Superintendent of Documents' home page. General information on accessing these databases is available by e-mail: help@eids05.eids.gpo.gov, phone: 202 512-1530 or fax: 202 512-1262.
The depository libraries are guaranteed to have the official government publication of the code, which is abbreviated as USC. Many libraries also carry the unofficial United States Code Annotated (USCA) and/or the United States Code Service (USCS) publications. These two contain the same statutory sections and organizational structure as the USC, but are much more user-friendly for two reasons. First, they supplement the text of the code with annotations. These extra notes include references to decisions that have interpreted a given section, historical notes about the development of the code, and references to other sources that interpret and analyze the code in question. Second, these two versions are published and updated much more quickly than the USC.
There are four general ways to find a specific item in one of the print code publications:
Section of Pub.L. 103-305
113(a)(2) ...................................... > 49 USCA S 47129
118(a) ......................................... > 49 USCA S 47130
205(a)(1) ...................................... > 49 USCA S 41311
206(a)(1) ...................................... > 49 USCA S 41714
207(a) ......................................... > 49 USCA S 41715
308(a) ......................................... > 49 USCA S 47509
Electronic Sources
The easiest way to find statutes is through one of the major online legal services -- Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw. The functionality and ease of use of these packages are high, but they are also, unfortunately, quite expensive. If you are affiliated with a law firm or law school, you may be able to get free or reduced-rate access to one of them, but otherwise these are probably not a realistic option.
There are also a couple places to get free access to the text of the U.S. Code on the Web:
US House Internet Law Library US Code Search (includes scope notes)
Federal Register
Like federal statutes, the federal regulations from administrative bodies like the FAA and NTSB are also officially published and then later codified. The official publication for regulations is called the Federal Register and is published daily. This publication, as well as the Code of Federal Regulations, can also be found at Federal Depository Libraries and a few places on the internet that are listed later in this section. Contents include not only regulations that have been enacted but also ones that have been proposed as well as special administrative documents like the Notices of Proposed Rulemaking discussed in the FAR amendments section of this web site.
The publication in 1981 of the amended FARs that resulted from the NPRMs I describe in that section is a good example of valuable documents that don't make it into the codified versions of regulations. Upon first exposure to the amendment notice (found at 54 FR 34292), the reader may be surprised to find extensive commentary on why each of the given amendments were adopted and why some amendments proposed by the public were not. The FAA also provides cost-benefit and impact analyses of the changes as well as a cross-reference tables for conversion from (1) the old to the new and (2) the new to the old FAR sections. Then the full revised FARs are provided with a list of amendments adopted listed by section at the end.
The Federal Register is available from Federal Depository Libraries and online through the Government Printing Office web page. This page has helpful search tools, but is still in a bit of an experimental stage.
Code of Federal Regulations
The codified versions of these statutes can be found in the official publication called the Code of Federal Regulations, which is quite similar to the USC, except that it is updated on a much more continuous basis. Like the U.S. Code, it is divided into 50 subject Titles, which often correspond to those for statutes, but not always (e.g. Title 49 of both codes is Transportation, but Title 14 is Coast Guard in the U.S. Code and Aeronautics and Space in the Code of Federal Regulations). Each year's code has a different colored cover, so you can tell at first glance whether the code in front of you has been updated yet this year.
Here's a rough picture of some of the portions of the CFR that are of interest to general aviation pilots:
Electronic Sources
Two terrific online sources of administrative materials are again Lexis and WestLaw. Due to the expense of accessing their services, however, I have chosen not to focus on them as sources of federal materials.
The Government Printing Office web page has a searchable online version of the CFR, which is currently under construction. Certain important parts of the code (e.g. NTSB 830) are not yet online.
The FAA issues numerous documents that are either regulatory, nonregulatory, or some combination of both, but are not part of the FARs. In order to be an informed user of the National Airspace System, it is important to be aware of these documents.
Advisory Circulars
The AIM states that "the FAA issues advisory circulars (AC's) to inform the aviation public of nonregulatory material of interest. Unless incorporated into a regulation by reference, the contents of an advisory circular are not binding on the public." On many occasions, however, the NTSB has used guidelines set out in ACs as a standard by which to measure the actions of pilots. It is, therefore, often in your best interest to find out what the ACs have to say about a given area of operation. The ACs are issued in a numbered subject system corresponding to the subject areas of the FARs as set out in 14 CFR Chapter 1.
If you'd like a full list of available ACs, you can request the free checklist ( AC 00-2) from
U.S. Department of Transportation
Distribution Requirements Section M-494.1
Washington, DC 20590
If you know of a particular AC you would like to find, you may be able to find it at
You can also send for ACs from the FAA. For those offered for free (consult the checklist mentioned above to see whether or not a given AC is free or for sale), send a written request to:
p>For those that are for sale, write to
U.S. Department of Transportaton
TASC, Subsequent Distribution Office, SVC-121.23
Ardmore East Business Center
3341 Q 75th Avenue
Landover, MD 20785
FAX (301) 386-5394
(They accept mail and FAX requests only.)
Superintendent of Documents P.O. Box 371954 Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954 (202) 512-1800 (Order Desk)
Airworthiness Directives
ADs are documents that lay out maintenance procedures that must be followed for a particular make and model of aircraft in order for that aircraft to be considered airworthy. Example could be special inspections that must be carried out (in addition to the standard inspections required of all aircraft) or parts that must be replaced after a given number of hours of operation.
These documents can be found online at
You can also request ADs from the FAA, but writing to
Federal Aviation Administration
Engineering and Manufacturing Branch, AFS-610
P.O. Box 26460
Oklahoma City, OK 73125
(405) 954-4374
Other maintenance documents
Aviation Airworthiness Alerts -- (PDF format only) July 1996 - Present, listed by month.
Service Difficulty Reports -- ( May 1994 - Present, updated weekly. Includes search engine with numerous search fields.