Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian called on Washington to increase funding for the Federal Aviation Administration after an outage of a pilot alert system that grounded thousands of flights across the U.S. this week. The FAA halted U.S. flight departures on Wednesday morning after it reset the Notice to Air Missions system, which had failed from a corrupted data file. More than 10,000 flights were delayed or canceled that day as a result. The Associated Press has the story:
Airlines back more funds, staff to fix FAA system
Newslooks- DALLAS (AP)
Airline executives bristled last year when government officials, led by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, blamed the carriers for causing thousands of flight cancellations and mistreating their customers.
The shoe is on the other foot now after a technology outage at the Federal Aviation Administration grounded planes for a time earlier this week, but airline leaders are taking a different tack.
They’ve avoided harsh words and score-settling. Instead they’re calling on Congress and the Biden administration to give the FAA more staff and more money to upgrade its systems.
“The FAA, I know, is doing the very best they can with what they have, but we need to stand behind the FAA,” Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Friday.
American Airlines CEO Robert Isom praised the FAA for “calling a time out” Wednesday morning — temporarily barring planes nationwide from taking off — while it fixed a system that provides safety and other information to pilots and airline dispatchers. He said it showed that safety comes first.
“Investment is required,” Isom told CNBC. “It’s going to be billions of dollars, and it’s not something that is done overnight.”
The airline executives, of course, have an interest in making sure that the FAA can function. The agency manages the nation’s airspace and hires air traffic controllers who must juggle a mix of passenger and cargo jets, smaller private planes, helicopters and drones.
Bastian said the FAA’s lack of adequate staffing is causing longer flight times and making it harder to operate in congested parts of the Northeast and Florida.
“There is no question that the investment in a modernized air-traffic control system will drive a tremendous amount of efficiencies as well as growth, which will mean better service for the American public,” he told reporters.
Airline executives no doubt want to remain in the good graces of the bureaucrats who regulate them. Isom went out of his way to praise the leadership ability of Buttigieg, who heads the FAA’s parent organization.
Airlines have been pushing the FAA to modernize the air-traffic control system for years. They argue that a faster and complete rollout of a so-called NextGen navigation plan will benefit the traveling public by making flights more efficient and reliable.
The FAA’s technology is certain to be a key issue this year, as Congress considers legislation that would govern the agency for the next five years.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said the Senate Commerce Committee which she leads will look into the outage. She has also promised to look into airline outages like the one that struck Southwest last month.
The new chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Missouri Republican Sam Graves, said the breakdown of the FAA alert system “underscores the number of empty desks and vacant offices at the FAA,” including the lack of a permanent administrator since the last one quit in March 2021.
Graves said he expects the FAA to brief members of Congress, “to make sure that we know what went wrong, who’s responsible, and how this is going to be prevented in the future.” He added that he wants to know how the Transportation Department will “do right by the passengers it has wronged.”
Graves has not commented about FAA funding levels.
Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., who headed the panel’s aviation subcommittee until this month, said he is optimistic that Democrats and Republicans can overcome their partisan differences and help the FAA improve its technology.
“This was a major disruption to the traveling public, and they didn’t deserve it,” he said.
