Department of Transportation July 26, 2012 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

On January 3, 2011, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), as the lead federal agency, and the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) published a Notice of Intent (NOI) to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the North Red and Purple Line Modernization (RPM) Project in Cook County, Illinois. The purpose of this supplemental NOI is to inform interested parties that the EIS will no longer be a Tier 1 EIS as originally proposed. The methodology and format will now be a standard project-level EIS. All other aspects (Location, Purpose and Need, Alternatives, Scoping, and Possible Effects) of the original NOI remain unchanged. Activities conducted to date pursuant to the original NOI will not be impacted or reexamined. The proposed project, described more completely in the January 3, 2011 NOI, would bring the North Red and Purple lines up to a state of good repair from the track structure immediately north of Belmont Station in Chicago to the Linden terminal in Wilmette, Illinois. Materials describing the project purpose and need and the alternatives proposed for analysis are available on the CTA Web site www.transitchicago.com/rpmproject. The CTA operates the rapid transit system in metropolitan Chicago, Illinois.

We propose to adopt a new airworthiness directive (AD) for the Eurocopter Deutschland GmbH (Eurocopter) Model MBB-BK 117 C-2 helicopters. This proposed AD is prompted by the discovery that some helicopters have blind rivets installed in the place of solid rivets in the long tail rotor drive shaft. The proposed actions are intended to detect blind rivets installed in the long tail rotor drive shaft, which could lead to failure of the tail rotor drive shaft and subsequent loss of control of the helicopter.

DOT publishes the names of the persons selected to serve on the various Departmental PRBs as required by 5 U.S.C. 4314(c)(4).