The first post in this thread is from a NY Times article by Matthew Wald dated 17 Feb 2004.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1080052/posts
The FAA has since announced that this initiative (and many others) is to be shelved until the following decade (at which time it will be announced that it's irrelevant as the affected airplane types are no longer operating and because there's no-one left in the agency who can recall why they were going to do it in the first place)..
So this thread is mighty misleading.