Politically Unstable: Aviation safety is in crisis

OPINION:

The FAA is a dysfunctional agency full of corruption, laziness, and archaic systems.

The Trump administration must deliver an air traffic control system that once again stands as the world’s gold standard, built by true innovators ready to deliver results, not by the same entrenched FAA bureaucrats who have spent decades recycling failure. 

Kelly Sadler is joined by Michael Pearson, pilot and aviation professor, and Ricky Castaldo, U.S. Navy veteran and retired radar systems engineer on Politically Unstable to discuss.

[SADLER] The column caught my attention when it was submitted because it involved an incident with Air Force One. You would think the safest airline in the world would be Air Force One. But as the president was traveling over to England to meet with Keir Starmer, a commercial airline entered Air Force One’s airspace. And there could have been a collision. So, Michael, I will start off with you. Can you take us through this line of events and give us your state of where you think the commercial airline industry is and what the FAA, now under Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, needs to do to improve air traffic control and to modernize the way that we travel? 

[PEARSON] The issue between Air Force One and the commercial airliner — although it got a lot of publicity, and certainly it could have been catastrophic — there was plenty of separation there. There were some technical rules that were violated, but at no time was President Trump in any real danger of colliding with the commercial airliner. It’s just basically there’s excessive separation applied between certain aircraft, including Air Force One, Air Force Two and some other military aircraft and commercial airliners. And that was just compromised at that time. So, while it was an issue and while the airplane should not have been there, I want to assure everyone, including President Trump, that in no time was there any real danger to the president. 

With that said, the system is archaic. Rick will speak to this, I’m sure, in a moment, but perhaps more importantly, and for what Secretary Duffy should be focusing on, is not doing the same thing that’s been done historically in the past, certainly for the past 40 and 50 years that I’ve been involved in aviation, and expecting a different outcome. The FAA is a dysfunctional agency. Changing the administrator is not going to help. People have way too much authority in certain silos, including the air traffic organization. And there is a revolving door that certainly is prevalent and entrenched in the aviation community, where bureaucrats that work for the FAA, retire, go to work for contractors, and then go peddle their wares, including airspace and technology improvements to people in the very same section branching contracting offices that they just left. 

Now this is normal in government enterprise and services. The thing that’s different is, the FAA’s mandate for running a modern, efficient, safe system is greatly compromised by this. And I’ll give you an example. As the article stated, this is not the first time that the FAA has allegedly tried — or Congress or the DOT — to modernize the system and make it more safe and efficient. In fact, as you probably read in the article, and the early 2000s, something called NextGen was created and implemented in mid-2000s, 2004, 2005. And to date, the cost of those programs are over $35 billion. Only 16%, at least by my number crunching, of the improvements have actually been entrenched or integrated into the system. So the FAA is in the process of trying to follow Secretary Duffy’s mandate and the President’s mandate to modernize the system, both for the safety aspects and certainly to make it more efficient. But there’s many structural problems the FAA has that they’re not simply going to overcome by rhetoric. And they’re certainly not going to overcome the issues by allowing the exact same people who created the problems to now advise them and guide them on how to fix the problems that the bureaucrats created. And that’s what I see happening with the DOT and the FAA at this time. 

Watch the video for the full conversation.

Read more: American aviation safety needs new voices, fresh ideas

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