How Many Rules Does America Need to Fly?

How Many Rules Does America Need to Fly?

The FAA’s Endless Guidance Problem — and Why It Proves the System Is Broken**

American aviation is the envy of the world — or at least it used to be.

The safest, most innovative airspace ever built wasn’t created by bureaucrats in Washington. It was created by pilots, mechanics, engineers, and operators who took real risks, solved real problems, and built a national aviation culture unmatched anywhere on earth.

Somewhere along the way, though, our government forgot who the customer is.

Instead of treating pilots and operators as partners, the FAA built a regulatory maze so convoluted that even the agency itself can’t navigate it without issuing thousands of pages of additional explanations.

Today, we live under a system where the rulebook is so bloated that the FAA must continuously issue legal interpretations, advisory circulars, and special guidance to clarify its own words — sometimes contradicting previous interpretations. Sometimes contradicting themselves. Sometimes contradicting common sense.

This is not safety.

This is not leadership.

This is bureaucracy spinning out of control.

And for the first time in decades, the courts are signaling that the era of “because we said so” is coming to an end.

The FAR/AIM: 1,300 Pages of “Figure It Out Yourself”

Ask any pilot about the FAR/AIM and you’ll get a tired smile — maybe even a laugh. It’s enormous, constantly changing, and written in a language only a lawyer could love. The 2025 ASA FAR/AIM runs 1,200–1,300 pages, and that’s before you start adding in the interpretations, advisory circulars, and FAA legal memos that explain what half the rules actually mean.

Pilots are expected to comply with:

• Thousands of regulatory subsections
• Appendices written decades ago
• ACs that range from helpful to outdated
• Regional variations in inspector “interpretation”

This would be comical if the stakes weren’t so high.

Aviation is unforgiving.

Regulation shouldn’t be.

Yet with every passing year, the rulebook becomes longer, murkier, more inconsistent — and more dependent on the FAA explaining the FAA.

Over 1,000 Legal Interpretations — Because the FAA Can’t Explain Itself

If the FAA had written clear, coherent, plain-language regulations, why would it need more than 1,000 legal interpretations just to clarify them?

The answer is simple: because ambiguity has been profitable. Ambiguity has been power. Ambiguity has allowed the FAA to act not only as a regulator, but as the arbiter of what their own regulations ought to mean on any given day.

For decades, pilots, mechanics, flight schools, air carriers, and operators have been forced to beg the FAA for clarity:

• “Does this rule apply in this case?”
• “What does this paragraph mean?”
• “Why does my inspector say the opposite of your legal memo?”

When a regulatory system requires legal opinions just to decode basic operational requirements, the system is not functioning.

It is failing.

Advisory Circulars: When the FAA Knows Its Rules Don’t Work

Advisory Circulars (ACs) were supposed to provide optional guidance.

Today, they’re practically a second regulatory library.

There are hundreds of ACs covering airworthiness, training, airports, avionics, flight operations, maintenance, and even commercial space. Counting every revision, withdrawal, replacement, and supplement pushes the total number of FAA AC documents easily into four figures.

When the rulebook is clear, you don’t need that much “guidance.”

When the rulebook is a mess, you need guidance for the guidance.

The FAA has chosen the latter.

Chevron Doctrine: The Turning Point the FAA Didn’t Want

For decades, the FAA’s response to regulatory confusion was almost automatic:

Issue an interpretation, cite Chevron, and end the debate.

The Chevron Doctrine allowed agencies to enforce their “reasonable interpretation” of ambiguous regulations. And when you give a federal agency the ability to interpret its own ambiguity, you incentivize one thing:

Write more ambiguous rules.

Chevron made it easy for the FAA to win enforcement actions.

Chevron protected vague, outdated regulations from legal challenge.

Chevron allowed inspectors in different regions to enforce rules differently.

But now, Chevron is gone.

With the Supreme Court overturning the doctrine, regulators no longer get automatic deference when they stretch, twist, or reinterpret their own rules. Courts must now apply the plain meaning of the regulation — not what the FAA wishes the rule said or what the agency argues it meant 20 years after writing it.

This raises a question that cuts to the core of FAA oversight:

If a regulation can’t stand on its plain language, is the regulation even valid anymore?

The FAA has leaned on interpretation for decades.

Without Chevron, that era ends.

Now the rules must speak for themselves — and many won’t survive scrutiny.

This is the moment pilots should seize.

The Real Problem: The FAA Built a System It Cannot Manage

No amount of interpretations, circulars, or memos can fix a rulebook that is fundamentally unclear.

No legal doctrine can justify a regulatory system that contradicts itself.

No inspector should be allowed to enforce rules he or she cannot personally explain.

The avalanche of interpretations and ACs proves:

• The FARs are outdated
• The FARs are contradictory
• The FARs are written for lawyers, not aviators
• Enforcement varies wildly by region
• The FAA has relied on ambiguity as a crutch

Chevron masked this dysfunction for decades.

Now the mask is gone.

America First Means Aviation First — and Aviation First Begins With Clarity

If America wants to remain the world leader in aviation — in training, manufacturing, operations, and innovation — we cannot afford a regulatory system trapped in the past, patched together with legal memos and advisory circulars.

True reform looks like this:

1. Rewrite the regulations in plain English.

If a pilot can’t understand a rule without a law degree, the rule is broken.

2. End adversarial enforcement.

Pilots and operators are customers, not targets.

3. Hold the FAA to the same standard as those they regulate.

If a rule requires interpretation, the burden is on the agency — not the pilot.

4. Replace political appointees with aviation professionals.

America deserves regulators who have actually flown the airplane.

Conclusion: The Skies Belong to the People, Not the Bureaucracy

The number of interpretations and advisory circulars isn’t just a statistic.

It’s a measurement of dysfunction.

It is proof that the FAA has lost control of its own rulebook.

But thanks to the end of Chevron, the door is now open for something aviation has lacked for a generation:

Accountability. Clarity. A return to common sense.

America built the greatest airspace in the world.

It’s time we had a regulatory system worthy of it.