At the No Plane, No Gain breakfast on Tuesday morning at NBAA-BACE 2022, members of Congress on the panel shared their concerns about personnel shortages and technology advances outpacing the FAA’s ability to keep pace with aviation industry developments. The FAA is due for reauthorization in September, at the end of the FAA’s fiscal year 2023, and legislators are already planning for how a funding bill can help the FAA deal with these issues.
“The challenge becomes ensuring that we have an FAA that keeps up,” said House aviation subcommittee Chairman Rick Larsen (D-Washington), “and that is an important focus of the bill next year. [We’re] sending a clear signal to the FAA that Congress recognizes that the airspace is changing, users of the airspace are changing, the tools and the technologies to get in the airspace are changing, and that we would want the FAA to change along with it, to keep up with that technology.”
“Just expertise in the FAA is getting to be more and more of a problem,” added Sam Graves (R-Missouri), ranking Republican on the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee. “We’re seeing that more and more from the FAA and regulators. Obviously, a career in the private sector is much more lucrative and desirable than a career within the FAA. That’s one of the problems that we’re seeing. But we have got to do a better job of getting folks involved in aviation. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to school to be a mechanic or pilot, it takes a commitment and it takes money, and we have got to tackle that. We’re going to be in a situation where it’s going to be worse.”
Graves worries that more FAA regulation could come as a result of FAA lack of understanding about new technology, in part due to lack of experience in the FAA ranks. “Heaven forbid we ever have an accident,” he said, “and they’ll become reactive, that’s what government does. The pendulum is going to swing, it’s going to swing hard and stifle whatever industry they have targeted whether that’s advanced air mobility or commercial aviation or drones. When emotion comes into play, there’s no data-driven [choices] on the decisions that are made.”
