How It WorksFind a HangarList Your Hangar
Get StartedGet a Demo
How It WorksFind a HangarList Your HangarSign In
Get StartedGet a Demo
Get Started
Back to blog

What Happens When a Tenant Files an FAA Complaint

T

The Hangar Direct Team

hangardirect.com

complianceFAAairport operations

Most airport directors will never see a federal complaint. The ones who do tend to learn the process while it is already running, which is the worst time. Here is how the two tracks work.

Most airport directors will never see one. The ones who do tend to learn the process while it is already running, which is the worst time.

Here is how the two federal complaint tracks work, what the deadlines are, what the FAA can actually do to a sponsor, and what the resolution usually looks like. This is a general explainer, not legal advice; if a complaint is actually pending against your airport, you want your airport attorney, not a blog post.

Two Doors, Very Different Rooms

A person who believes a federally obligated airport is violating its grant assurances has two options.

14 CFR Part 13 is the informal track. A complaint can be submitted verbally or in writing. It goes to the FAA regional office or Airports District Office. The FAA's own guidance is direct about the pace: Part 13 imposes no time deadlines for issuing decisions. Staff compile a record, communicate with both sides, and work toward a resolution. An informal complaint that sits inactive for two or more years is considered stale.

14 CFR Part 16 is the formal track. It is an adjudicatory proceeding run out of FAA headquarters, with strict pleading deadlines, a written record, a decision by the Director, an appeal to the Associate Administrator, and judicial review after that.

If you are the sponsor, Part 13 is very much the door you want them walking through.

Not Everyone Can File a Part 16

Standing is a real filter. Under 14 CFR 16.23(a), a complaint may be filed by a person directly and substantially affected by the alleged noncompliance, or by a person qualified under 49 CFR 26.105(c).

The rule adds one specific presumption: a person doing business with an airport and paying fees or rentals to the airport is considered directly and substantially affected by alleged revenue diversion as defined in 49 U.S.C. 47107(b).

General citizen or taxpayer standing is not enough. A neighbor who dislikes the airport does not have standing. Your hangar tenant paying rent does.

There is also a gate before filing. Section 16.21 requires a complainant to have initiated and engaged in good faith efforts to resolve the dispute informally, and to certify those efforts in the complaint.

That requirement matters, because it means a sponsor who takes tenant complaints seriously in the ordinary course is building a record that pays off later.

The Part 16 Clock

Once a complaint is filed under Part 16, the pleading schedule is compressed:

  • The FAA dockets the complaint and notifies the parties within 20 days of receipt (16.23(c))
  • The respondent sponsor files an answer within 20 days (16.23(d))
  • The complainant files a reply within 10 days (16.23(e))
  • The respondent files a rebuttal within 10 days (16.23(f))

Every pleading must come with supporting documentation. That is the operative detail for a sponsor. You have 20 days to produce leases, rate schedules, board minutes, correspondence, and whatever else supports your position. If those documents are scattered across a filing cabinet, a shared drive, and three people's inboxes, twenty days is not a comfortable window.

After the record closes, the Director issues a Director's Determination. There is no fixed regulatory deadline for that step, and contested cases commonly run considerably longer than the pleading schedule suggests.

From there:

  • A party adversely affected may file a notice of appeal and brief within 30 days of service (16.33(c))
  • A reply may be filed within 20 days (16.33(d))
  • The Associate Administrator issues a final decision and order within 60 days after the reply is due (16.33(g))
  • If nobody appeals, the Director's Determination becomes final without further action (16.33(h)), and a determination that becomes final because it was not appealed is not judicially reviewable

Judicial review of a final decision and order runs to a U.S. Court of Appeals under 49 U.S.C. 46110, with a 60-day filing window (16.247).

What the FAA Can Actually Do

This is the part directors most often guess at.

Corrective action. The FAA's clear preference is voluntary correction. A voluntary corrective action plan, or vCAP, is the sponsor's written commitment to fix identified noncompliance on a schedule the FAA accepts. This is the ordinary landing place for the large majority of matters.

Withholding funds. Under 49 U.S.C. 47107(m)(3), the FAA may withhold amounts otherwise available to the sponsor under Title 49, which can extend beyond airport grants to transit and other multimodal funds. Discretionary AIP grants (49 U.S.C. 47115) and general aviation airport grants (49 U.S.C. 47114(d)) can be withheld for violations that corrective action does not remedy.

Civil penalties. For revenue diversion, 49 U.S.C. 46301(a)(3) provides for a civil penalty of up to three times the amount of diverted revenue. The Administrator may impose a penalty up to $50,000 administratively and must go to federal district court to enforce a proposed penalty above that. Interest on diverted revenue is addressed at 49 U.S.C. 47107(n).

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 revised parts of this framework, allowing recovery in a judicial action of up to twice the value of illegally diverted revenue, applicable to diversions occurring after enactment.

Grant eligibility. In the extreme, continued noncompliance affects the sponsor's ability to receive future federal airport funding, which for most GA airports is the real leverage.

A vCAP Can End a Part 16

This is the most practically useful thing in the process for a sponsor.

Under 14 CFR 16.26(b)(1)(ii), a Part 16 complaint can be dismissed where the matter is already being addressed. In practice, when the FAA accepts a sponsor's voluntary corrective action plan covering the same claims raised in a formal complaint, that acceptance can moot the Part 16.

A live example: Martin County, sponsor of Witham Field, moved to dismiss a Part 16 complaint on the basis that the FAA Southern Region had accepted the county's voluntary corrective action plan addressing the same issues. The county was directed to submit its vCAP in early January 2026.

The lesson for a sponsor is straightforward. If a complaint has merit, fixing it quickly and formally through the informal track is both cheaper and faster than litigating it through the formal one.

What a Real Consequence Looks Like

Santa Monica is the clearest documented example of a sponsor facing actual orders.

In Docket 16-16-02, the FAA issued a Director's Determination on November 8, 2019 finding the City not in compliance with 49 U.S.C. 47133 and 47107(l) and Grant Assurance 25, because advances and loans to the airport fund were not clearly documented as loans or were charged excessive interest. In the subsequent Final Agency Decision, the FAA found the interest calculation on a $2,414,000 transfer was incorrect and ordered the City to submit an accounting and a repayment schedule for interest and principal overpayment plus interest.

The City faced a second matter years later. In a Director's Determination issued December 22, 2025 under docket FAA-2024-2108, arising from a July 2024 complaint by a pilot, an aviation business, and NBAA, the FAA found the City not in conformance with Grant Assurance 25 based on the City's own forecast of a substantial non-aeronautical surplus, and ordered the City to revise its fee structure within 30 days and implement new aeronautical rates within 60 days.

Thirty days to revise a fee structure is a fast clock for a municipal government.

Cases Worth Knowing

Clarke v. City of Alamogordo, FAA Docket 16-05-19 (2006). The FAA held that neither the existence nor the exercise of lease reversion clauses is required of sponsors. Useful for rebutting the common claim that the FAA compels reversion of privately built hangars.

Boca Airport, Inc. v. FAA, 389 F.3d 185 (D.C. Cir. 2004). An FBO lease dispute at Boca Raton that reached the D.C. Circuit, illustrating what judicial review of a Part 16 matter looks like.

Valley Aviation Services v. City of Glendale, Arizona. The enforcement matter in which the FAA found a sponsor in violation for allowing hangars to be used to store automobiles, boats, and RVs. This case is part of the background to the 2016 hangar use policy.

SoCal Pilots Association v. County of Orange, FAA Docket 16-23-17, concerning John Wayne Airport. The complaint alleges Grant Assurance 22 and 24 violations arising from a general aviation improvement program that reduces small-aircraft hangar and tie-down capacity. The county acknowledged the program results in a reduction of 242 tie-down aprons, T-hangars, box hangars, shade structures, and FBO apron spaces. Check the current docket status before relying on any outcome.

Haney v. County of Los Angeles, FAA Docket 16-24-14, filed October 14, 2024, concerning non-aeronautical hangar storage rents at El Monte. This one is pending. It is an allegation, not a finding, and should be described that way.

One honest caveat: the FAA does not publish annual statistics on how many Part 16 complaints are filed, how many result in findings of noncompliance, or how long they typically take. Anyone citing those numbers is estimating.

Preparing Without Being Paranoid

You cannot prevent a complaint. You can make responding to one uneventful.

Be able to produce your records in twenty days. Leases with all amendments, current rate schedule and the minutes adopting it, correspondence with the complaining party, your minimum standards, and your waitlist history. If assembling that would take a week of someone's time, that is the finding, whether or not a complaint ever arrives.

Document your decisions when you make them. A rate set by a documented methodology is defensible. A rate that exists because it has always been that rate is harder to explain.

Take informal complaints seriously. The good-faith resolution requirement in 16.21 means a tenant has to try before they file. That is your opportunity, and it is the cheapest point in the whole process to resolve something.

Apply your rules consistently. Most economic discrimination claims are not about the rule. They are about the fact that it was enforced against one tenant and not another.

If you are wrong, fix it fast and formally. The vCAP path exists, the FAA prefers it, and it can end a formal complaint.

Keeping lease documents, amendments, rate history, insurance certificates, and waitlist records in one place with an audit trail is what the Hangar Direct platform does. The twenty-day response window is a good reason to know where everything is before you need it.

Sources

Be able to produce your records in twenty days

The Part 16 answer window is 20 days, with supporting documentation. Book a walkthrough and see what it looks like when every lease, rate, and certificate is one export away.

Book a walkthrough
Back to all posts