Ensuring safety in the skies is the Federal Aviation Administration’s core mission, but that can too easily get lost under a blizzard of bureaucratic rules and regulations. Consider the FAA’s ambitious “Next Gen” air traffic control system, which by 2020 will replace 300 aging radar stations with a sophisticated satellite-based global positioning system. The FAA could easily have included all aircraft in its final rule requiring pilots to be able to broadcast their position and velocity to other air traffic in the general vicinity. But nonmotorized aircraft, including gliders, were inexplicably exempted despite the fact that nine people have died and dozens more have been injured in accidents involving gliders and airplanes, including two pilots who were killed in a midair collision last November over Middletown, Calif.

This omission is particularly disturbing given that the National Transportation Safety Board, which has investigated all of these crashes, has repeatedly recommended that the FAA require gliders to carry devices that make them visible to other aircraft. Glider owners have long resisted these efforts because the available technology was cumbersome and expensive. FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto told The Examiner that gliders were exempted because “they fly in remote areas.” That logic cannot be encouraging to the owners, pilots and passengers who use more than a quarter-million general aviation aircraft in this country, many of which operate in the same “remote areas.”