The head of the Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday he won't forget the 67 people who died when an airliner collided with an Army helicopter over Washington, D.C., in January, insisting he won't allow operations in the airspace over the nation's capital to revert back to the way they were before the crash.
Administrator Bryan Bedford gave the House aviation subcommittee an update on a number of key concerns about his agency during Tuesday's
hearing, including whether he believes the provisions of a major defense bill that have been widely criticized by safety experts will make flying riskier.
“It’s unfortunate, it’s beyond unfortunate, it’s tragic that the focus that we have today — the attention and our sort of unified, galvanized effort to modernize — was paid for with the lives of 67 Americans. It’s unfortunate, but that sacrifice can’t go to waste,” Bedford said. “We have to deliver for them and for the rest of the American people.”
Bedford promised he won't allow the airspace to become less safe, even though critics have said the defense bill would open the door to allowing military helicopters to resume flying through the crowded airspace around Washington without broadcasting their locations. The FAA required all aircraft to use ADS-B systems in the wake of the collision, and changed its practices to ensure that helicopters and planes no longer share the same airspace and that controllers no longer rely on pilots to ensure visual separation between aircraft.
“There's no rolling back of the safety procedures we put in place since that horrific evening,” Bedford said without taking a position on the defense bill. "Our vigilance isn't waning."
Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., are urgently trying to amend the defense bill, but that may not happen because congressional leaders don't want to risk delaying that bill by sending it back to the House for another vote. If changing the defense bill is not possible, Cruz and Cantwell have promised to push for approval of a bill they introduced last summer that would require all aircraft to broadcast their locations.
Bedford told the committee that by the end of the year the FAA expects to have committed more than $6 billion of the $12.5 billion Congress approved to pay for an overhaul of the nation's air traffic control system. The agency has already replaced more than one-third of the outdated copper wires the system was relying on with modern connections like fiber optic lines.
But Rep. Hank Johnson Jr., D-Ga., said he doesn't “have a lot of confidence in this working out for the American people” after the FAA chose Peraton, a national security contractor with little FAA experience, to oversee the upgrades that are expected to cost more than $31 billion total. Johnson questioned whether this is a “pay-to-play situation.” Peraton is owned by a massive private equity firm called Veritas Capital.
“How is the FAA ensuring that outsourcing this massive modernization project to a largely untested contractor will not put safety at risk, create further delays or overburden your already overworked workforce?” Johnson said.
Bedford said Peraton was chosen because it has expertise in helping the Defense Department and NASA convert systems from analog to digital and moving those systems to the cloud online. The other contractor that applied for the job, Parsons, has worked with FAA extensively, but Bedford said it didn't have that cloud experience and the FAA wants to move its computing power out of individual towers to a national system that's based online.
“Peraton brought a competency that is relevant to what we need. It had nothing to do with who they knew. The president did not interfere, nor did the secretary in the selection process. It was transparent. It was diligent,” he said.
In a letter to lawmakers, Bedford also defended the FAA's decision during the government shutdown to order airlines to cut thousands of flights because of concerns about air controller staffing and safety data. But instead of offering additional details about what that decision was based on, Bedford essentially repeated the reasons Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy offered at the time.
Bedford said safety experts at the FAA noticed a dramatic increase in controller absences along with an uptick in near misses and runway incursions, but he didn't offer any data on those incidents.
“I am confident that decreasing operations during an uncertain and stressful time was the right decision on behalf of the flying public and the United States,” Bedford said.
