The FARs are a massive document and are updated asynchronously. As a result, we can't always be 100% sure that we have the absolute latest. However, unlike other ways of reading the FAR, FastFAR is updated REGULARLY and AUTOMATICALLY. In practice, this essentially always means a more up-to-date copy of the FARs than any other competing product - software, book, website, or otherwise (see the example below)

Why use FastFAR? Check out this real-world example.

Recently (actually, more than six months ago at the time of this writing!) , the powers that be updated CFR 14 Part 61.19. This is not some obscure regulation, but a key one that deals with the duration of student pilot certificates that is of importance topilots and instructors. Let’s try looking it up, shall we?

First, as a baseline, check out FastFAR's entry. It represents the current and up to date 61.19 at the time of this writing. Any FastFAR user can get the latest FastFAR dataset automatically through FastFAR's built in self-updater which generally takes a few moments to work either when the program is first starting up or when an update is explicitly started (please note that the font here is small to fit your web browser - FastFAR itself includes a font scaling feature that makes it easy to read).

Ok, so FastFAR is up to date. What about other ways that you might consider to look up the same information?

A Google search for 'FAR 61.19' results in a number of hits. Most are advertising-driven sites that have been quickly put at some point in the indefinite past. You'll recognize these sites because of the large numbers of ads that surround the content and the fact that the user interface tends to be poor, as the main goal of such sites is to keep you clicking rather than to actually help you. At the time of this writing ALL of such 'free' sites that we looked to had out of date FAR 61.19 information - as of this writing - all were at least six months out of date. Here's an example:

Hmm.. what about the FAA's website, then, surely they have more up-to-date information? Surprisingly, this is not always the case. FARs and other material take an odd route to the FAA's website - they have to go via the GPO, and as a result, the FAA's own website can features out-of-date FAR copies. While there is usually at least one up-to-date copy of the FARs on the FAA website, this is not necessraily the one that search engines 'catch', which can lead to problems. For example, at the time of this writing, searching for "FAR 61.19" using Google on faa.gov results in an out-of-date copy being the first result. To the FAA's credit, there is a note there warning that it may be out of date (just like we have a note stating that due to unforseen circumstances that FastFAR may occasionally also go slightly out of date), but this is still less than satisfying. Yes, the current version on the FAA's website can in some sense be considered canonical, but you need to navigate carefully to make sure that you are indeed looking at their most current one, as this is often not clear.

Admittedly, the GPO's website is better in terms of up-to-datedness, but this is largely an unsearchable and undercipherable mess - unless you happen to be our software robot, which continuously contacts the GPO and searches for FAR updates which it then repackages nicely for your for use in FastFAR.

Now, about those CDs. There's at least one company out there that will, for a fee, mail you a CD-ROM of key FAA documents, the FARs amongst them, for a ridiculous yearly subscription fee. Such a delivery mechanism probably made sense before the advent of the Internet. Now, it is an anachronism. But then there's the question - but even if you go to all that trouble to manually receive a CD-ROM in the mail every two weeks and install it, you at least will get up-to-date information, right? We can't say for sure, but during a discussion we had with a company that did this, they indicated to us that their means of searching through FAR updates was to do so MANUALLY. So, unless they have changed something as to how they do this or you are prepared to believe that they employ some eagle-eyed person who does nothing but reads and compares FARs 24/7 (as our automated updater does), it seems at least highly likely that their material tends to be out of date. Oh yes, and then there's the matter of the ridiculous cost for their services.

In a word, advertising-driven copies of the FAR tend to be updated seldom if ever. More often than not, they're somebody's weekend project to try to get a few pennies of advertising money via traffic to their website which simply doesn't justify the work necessary to keep the material up to date. As a result, you get material that is highly likely to be out of date and so may get you in trouble (see our example above). Even the FARs on the FAA websites tend to not be as up to date as those in FastFAR (which come via the US GPO). Furthermore, what's online tends to be slow, hard to search, hard to read, hard to print out what you want, and so forth.