FileMarker Pro had a dedicated server product (FileMaker Server) that you could use for multi-user access. Claris still sells it: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/
Microsoft Access was strictly file based. You could drop the .mdb/.accdb file on a SMB share and it would support basic concurrency via lock files. However, you could also swap out the internal database engine (Jet) with anything else via ODBC, so your Access database could connect to a remote Microsoft SQL Server instance - or even MySQL/Postgres.
Back in high school, I even wired up an Access database to give a graphical frontend to an accounting app running on an IBM AS/400 mainframe. ODBC made it easy, and Access itself didn't really care where the data lived.
Nit: If you're filing a flight plan, you do it with the country you're departing from. Even if you're piloting an aircraft departing into the US, it wouldn't have any effect on operations if you couldn't reach US websites. There's also several alternative ways for pilots to file flight plans outside of the web.
(The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networks independent of the Internet.)
There's also several different ways to transmit the passenger manifest to CBP - including over a CBP-provided VPN and IATA "Type B" messages sent through ARINC/SITA.
The network for Type B messages is also independent of the Internet (it was developed 60 years ago).
The part about power outages is certainly true in Tahoe. I grew up there and remember a week-long power outage as a kid, since the snow took out the feeder lines from both CA and NV simultaneously.
Outages that long aren't common, but it's not uncommon to lose power for about a day a few times each winter.
Piston aircraft are vital to training new pilots. Without the piston fleet, you wouldn't have anybody flying anything larger.
Not to mention they're frequently used for air ambulance flights, survey work, and law enforcement. The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.
Also, the current proposed plan is to migrate off of leaded gasoline for most of the country by 2030, which is actually quite ambitious given that acceptable alternative fuels didn't exist until literally a few years ago.
They can run in regular gas reliably enough for training, they can run on jet-a, they can run on batteries. Anything vital can run on jet-a without any barriers.
Excuses are made because it requires retiring or refitting old aircraft, and people need to be forced to do it. Simple as. I will die on this hill.
> The "satellite" view on most online mapping tools is recorded from a piston aircraft.
No, piston aircraft cannot run on Jet-A. That would cause detonation and the engine would quite literally self-destruct within minutes - likely during takeoff when the engine is at highest power.
There's been some trials of battery-powered trainer aircraft. The last I checked, they still don't have enough range to do the "long" cross country that's legally required.
And I assure you it's not because of old aircraft. Some flights schools have fleets of brand new 2025/26 models - all of them still run on leaded avgas.
I know a Velis Electro can fly for an hour, that's plenty of time for flight school. I'm sure there's better options now too. If something needs to take longer than that and is worth doing, then do it with a turboprop.
That's besides the fact that there are genuine certified unleaded alternative fuels for piston aircraft now. Fucking "we oh can't do it" lead apologists smh.
"One hour is plenty of time for flight school" is not doing you any favours in coming across as knowing what you're talking about lol. Good freaking luck completing cross-country flights for an instrument rating with that endurance, never mind your certainty that there are "better options" as if the laws of physics have changed dramatically between 2020 and today.
And I mentioned workhorse aircraft for a reason, considering that the Velis Electro has a payload of...172 kilograms. Turboprops (gas turbines in general) are far more expensive and far less fuel efficient at low altitudes than their piston engine counterparts, which is precisely why piston engines still exist.
The fact that alternative fuels now exist for piston engines does not make the blatantly wrong nonsense you've been throwing out any more correct, such as your suggestion that you can "just run" piston engines on Jet-A. That is something that anyone who actually knows anything about internal combustion engines can tell you for free causes regular piston engines to detonate/knock. Your assertion that piston-engine aircraft have virtually no vital role was similarly ignorant.
And that's besides the fact that black-and-white "if you don't agree with whatever half-assed or plainly incorrect crap I say in support of The Cause™ you're an apologist" nonsense lost its efficacy years ago; you might want to find a better soapboxing tactic for 2026.
It really doesn't matter if I don't know the paragraph eight of rule one hundred and thirty four, I know that if you can't do something without poisoning people you should not get to do it. That's as much as there is to it, and it's an argument you can't ever win without proving lead is harmless or something.
You can't just run piston engines on jet-a but you can run them on regular high octane from any regular gas station or any of the actual alternatives, my point was you can swap them for small turboprop powerplants and run the plane on jet-a. Afaik reducing knocking is not really the point of avgas either, which I'm sure you know, but vapor lock at high altitudes, which you can easily avoid by... not flying high, which by your own point is the main use case for piston aircraft. I guess we'll just spray lead over everyone instead, cause it's "safer".
One hour really isn't enough time. You can spend 30-40 minutes just getting in/out of busy terminal airspace, which would only leave 20-30 minutes for instruction - which is nothing. Most flight lessons are closer to 1.5 hours for a reason.
You're also legally required to maintain 30-45 minutes of emergency reserve, longer if you're flying IFR.
And again, this isn't even touching on the "long" cross-country flights that are legally required for training.
There definitely is urgency to phase out leaded aviation gasoline. The FAA is proposing that we phase it out by 2030 - just 4 years from now - even though we still haven't agreed on which of the 3 competing gas blends to standardize on, the pumping infrastructure only exists at a small number of airports, and even though there's still open concerns about them causing engine damage.
Leaded gasoline for cars started phasing out 52 years ago. It was fully banned 30 years ago. If there was any urgency behind getting rid of leaded avgas it would have been gone in that timeframe.
The FAA started looking at it 14 years ago. They planned to finish phasing it out in 2023. Three years after that, leaded avgas remains ubiquitous, and there's a plan to finish phasing it out in six years. (The 2030 date excludes Alaska, which is planned for 2032.) That's not what urgency looks like.
Cars don't need high octane fuel, aircraft do. Outside of the absolute smallest aircraft, you can't get enough power out of automobile gasoline.
They started looking at it 14 years ago, but there's been tons of bureaucratic roadblocks that have impeded progress. (Depending on who you ask, the petroleum companies were responsible for some of these.)
Even today, there are reports that the new unleaded avgas formulations cause engine damage, and we don't entirely know why that's happening. So there's still technical issues to work out. (But it's important, so folks are trying to solve them as quickly as possible.)
"They started looking at it 14 years ago" is all you need to see that there's no urgency. They should have started looking at it 60+ years ago when it first started being a prominent issue for cars. It's not like they didn't know about the problem.
All of that stuff could have been overcome a lot faster if there had been motivation to do so. What they should have done is declare, with plenty of advance warning (say, 10 years), that leaded avgas was going to become illegal when leaded car gas became illegal in 1996. If you want to keep flying, figure out how to do it without lead.
The reason it's taking ages is because the FAA just doesn't care that much. The EPA hasn't pushed on it very much. The FAA's priority is minimizing the impact to aviation, not protecting the public from lead pollution, so as long as the EPA doesn't push them, the FAA is content to take things very slow.
Put it on a shorter timeline and solutions would happen faster. Some of those solutions might involve some aircraft being retired due to not being viable in an unleaded world. The FAA doesn't want that, but it should have been done.
A transponder in a car is not an "aircraft station" (§ 87.5), therefore it is not covered by aircraft "license-by-rule" (§ 87.18(b)), so transmitting would be operating without a valid authorization (§ 1.903(a)). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
Microsoft Access was strictly file based. You could drop the .mdb/.accdb file on a SMB share and it would support basic concurrency via lock files. However, you could also swap out the internal database engine (Jet) with anything else via ODBC, so your Access database could connect to a remote Microsoft SQL Server instance - or even MySQL/Postgres.
Back in high school, I even wired up an Access database to give a graphical frontend to an accounting app running on an IBM AS/400 mainframe. ODBC made it easy, and Access itself didn't really care where the data lived.
reply