Why does it take so long for airmen registry processing?

[RobertGary1]

When you upgrade or renew any FAA certificate it goes into a black hole called "transferred to airmen registry". There it sits for 6-8 weeks until it becomes "received by airmen registry". How is this not a 5 second computer transfer? Is someone typing each 8710 out and then walking it down the hall so someone can manually enter the 8710 into a computer?

[thinwing]

my last rating took more than 120 days to process which ment my temp was soon to be invalid...called olklahoma and they emailed and extension.Got the perm 1 month later...blamed the delay on covid

[EricJ]

My understanding is that they do some cross checking and integrity/background tests that does take some human intervention/effort/oversight.   Since the FAA is perpetually understaffed (think of the taxes you're saving!) , and agencies are still recovering from pandemic delays, I'm not surprised with the delays.

 

[RobertGary1]

2 minutes ago, EricJ said:

My understanding is that they do some cross checking and integrity/background tests that does take some human intervention/effort/oversight.   Since the FAA is perpetually understaffed (think of the taxes you're saving!) , and agencies are still recovering from pandemic delays, I'm not surprised with the delays.

 

I’d be surprised if any of those checks can’t be done by a computer in seconds. Honestly I think you could have the dpe sign the app and then update the registry in under a minute. Maybe longer for atp because of the criminal history check. 

[N201MKTurbo]

1 hour ago, RobertGary1 said:

I’d be surprised if any of those checks can’t be done by a computer in seconds. Honestly I think you could have the dpe sign the app and then update the registry in under a minute. Maybe longer for atp because of the criminal history check. 

Have you ever worked with the FAA?

I was talking to my Principal Inspector a while back. He was bitching about how the idiots (his words, not mine) in DC keep trying to make things easier. He said everything they do makes things harder.