Concerns about chronic safety problems at Boeing have grown rapidly since door panel exploded on one of his jets in January – starting investigationscongress complaints hearings and the resignation of its CEO.
Four months later, Congress is poised to pass a major aviation bill that does little to increase oversight of the company.
The nearly 1,000-page bill, which the House is expected to send to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday, will guide aviation policy for the next five years, including reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration and allowing more drones and air taxis , in the crowded skies. . But it takes only modest steps toward other serious concerns plaguing air travel and does little or nothing to quell allegations of sloppy quality and lax federal oversight of Boeing.
Lawmakers said they need more time to study exactly what went wrong at the nation’s largest plane maker before legislating a solution. This outcome is a testament to both the complexities of the American aviation system and the difficulties of getting substantive legislation through a bitterly divided Congress.
“Is it 100 percent what I would like? No. But that’s what commitment is,” said the senator. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who chairs the Senate Commerce subpanel in charge of aviation, told POLITICO this month.
“It’s a good bill,” she said when asked whether the bill does enough to address an aviation system beset by a series of near-crashes on runways and concerns about quality control at Boeing.
Aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti said the project “lacks some of what I would call immediacy.”
The bill steers the FAA in the right direction on a series of safety measures, such as staffing controllers and ethics training for employees who oversee manufacturers, said Guzzetti, who has worked at the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board. But while it contains “a lot of studies and efforts,” he said, most of them would not produce potentially crucial data for “somewhere between six months to five years.”
The bill acts on a number of other fronts – including allowing five more long-haul roundtrip flights each day at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, despite objections from D.C.-area lawmakers who say it will increase congestion and compromise safety. The additional flights were a popular item for other lawmakers across the country, who typically travel between Washington and their districts twice a week.
The Senate approved the project on Thursday. The House is expected to vote on it on Wednesday, after debating it on Tuesday night.
Senate Democrats pushed for months for the bill to pass and made an explicit choice not to use it to increase oversight of Boeing.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, said the problems at Boeing will be addressed in a separate bill. She said she didn’t want to slow down the broader aviation measure, which has been stalled for so long that it needed four short-term extensions.
Even Duckworth, who has clashed with Cantwell on other issues, urged his colleagues to quickly pass the FAA bill, H.R. 3935 (118).
“This bill does not fully address the many vexing issues that have come to light since a door plug on an Alaska Airlines flight blew mid-flight,” she admitted in a speech this month. “Congress must look more closely at these issues…But this will take time, and this bill contains urgently needed solutions to address the imminent security risk. We must not delay approval of this FAA reauthorization while we continue our oversight of Boeing.”
Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance, who also sits on the Commerce Committee, agreed that “there is a lot more that could be done” in the bill. But he also admitted that negotiating with Boeing “is going to take a lot longer.”
“That would never be part of this particular FAA reauthorization,” he added.
But this is also a difficult task. Duckworth acknowledged earlier this month that there likely won’t be another bill to address Boeing – At least not this yearmainly due to the congress calendar compressed into an election year.
Although it contains little to address Boeing, the bill:
— Includes $105 billion in funding for the FAA over five years
— Attempts to bolster the FAA’s air traffic controller workforce, which has been plagued by shortages and fatigue — long-standing problems that have worsened during the pandemic
— Requires the placement of technology at more airports to help prevent planes from colliding with ground equipment — or each other
— Requires cockpit voice recordings to retain 25 hours of audio before being overwritten, rather than two hours
— Forces the FAA to study whether the plane’s design and operations — including seat size — are adequate to quickly evacuate passengers
— Requires additional protections for people flying with wheelchairs and other means of mobility, following years of passenger complaints about lost or damaged equipment
A case of bad timing?
In some ways, the decision to move forward with a must-pass aviation policy bill without anything addressing Boeing depends on the timing. Negotiations on the bill were already in the final stretch before Alaska Airlines’ door explosion in January, and lawmakers faced the choice of delaying the bill for months — perhaps even years — while they figured out how to tighten oversight of Boeing or move forward. with the project without her. .
David Soucie, an aviation safety analyst who worked for the FAA as an assistant manager in the safety oversight office, said it is not uncommon for Congress to respond to a specific event, such as the Alaska Airlines door plug incident, with legislation. separate from the broad and recurring accounts like this one.
The last time Boeing was under the microscope, following two mass casualty crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019, Congress responded with stand-alone legislation enacted in 2020. But that only happened after multiple investigations, Congressional investigations, and court cases. That law required the FAA to implement major changes to the way it oversees manufacturers like Boeing — some of which the agency is still implementing.
The argument that reauthorization bills “needed more teeth” every five years to direct the FAA to deal with specific issues has been around “since the beginning of time,” Soucie said.
And many lawmakers say they are still learning about what is happening at Boeing and what needs to be done to fix it — including the senator. Ricardo Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former Commerce member who now chairs the Senate Homeland Security investigations subcommittee.
“I think there are more steps that need to be taken,” Blumenthal said. “I anticipate we will deal with this separately if legislation is appropriate.”
Blumenthal’s subcommittee is in the midst of its own investigation into Boeing after a whistleblower at the company testified at hearing about threats and intimidation from his supervisors for talking about poor quality practices at one of Boeing’s assembly plants.
Congress has held several hearings related to Boeing’s quality problems, and lawmakers have said they intend to hold more as they figure out the answer. The chairman of the Chamber’s Transport Committee, deputy. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), said he wants to wait until the independent National Transportation Safety Board completes its investigation, which will take months longer.
Does the rest of the bill go far enough?
Retired Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who chaired the House Transportation Committee from 2019 until last year, said the bill includes some important provisions — including those aimed at helping the FAA hire more air traffic controllers , a job that is chronically understaffed and overworked.
The bill requires the FAA to work with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union to set higher hiring goals and improve how facilities are equipped. Lawmakers hope these measures will stem the recent rise in near-collisions, some of which may have been caused by drivers.
The bill also provides more money for other safety-critical positions such as aviation technicians, inspectors, engineers and others needed to oversee aircraft manufacturers.
“This is key,” DeFazio said in a recent interview. “What we heard during the Boeing investigation… is that [employees] I never saw an FAA inspector on site, which is unacceptable. You need people walking around.
The bill also includes measures to increase inspections at foreign aircraft repair stations, which are increasingly used by some U.S. airlines, and codify requirements for secondary cabin barriers on passenger aircraft to help protect pilots and flight controls from bad actors.
“All of these things are good for safety and security,” DeFazio said.
The project would require more airports to install technology that could detect ground equipmentthat may have fallen onto a runway or other restricted area. But the project gives five years for this to be implemented.
Jennifer Homendy, Chair of the Independent National Transportation Safety Board, called for more airports to be equipped with this technology. Homendy said last year that his agency has recommended for 23 years that planes should also be installed with equipment that notifies pilots of potential hazards on the runway, including other planes..
Outside of about 450 US airports with regular passenger service, about 45 have technology that can detect hazards on the ground. The FAA is in the process of activating additional surveillance technologies on dozens of others, in addition to equipping the ground vehicles themselves with location transmitters, between other steps.
But Guzzetti said the FAA already has a solid foundation of runway safety activities, “and I think this bill adds to that appropriately.”
Like some lawmakers, Guzzetti also believes the bill could have specifically targeted FAA oversight of manufacturing processes “in some way” and helped the FAA overcome its own complicated approach to dealing with concerns about approving aircraft as safe to fly.
Manufacturing oversight aside, the FAA’s organizational structure is not well-positioned to deal with the challenges the agency faces today, DeFazio said. This includes the need for more people with a specialized focus on drones and air taxis.
All of this makes the agency “inefficient and not ideal in terms of basically moving into the future and/or overseeing the industry,” he said.
Chris Marquette contributed to this report.
