Bryan Bedford, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), told senators at his confirmation hearing today that he will work to overhaul the FAA’s safety culture if he is confirmed, and indicated that any move to privatize the FAA is not in the government’s near-term plans.
Bedford – who is CEO at Republic Airways – fielded senators’ questions against the backdrop of January’s deadly midair collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and military helicopter outside of Washington, and a series of other technological failures resulting in mass airport delays which have raised safety concerns among many in Washington.
Before the collision outside of the Ronald Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va., the National Transportation Safety Board said the FAA should have taken action to improve safety at the airport after a recorded 85 near misses in the years before the crash.
Bedford pledged to lawmakers today that he would work to overhaul current FAA leadership and culture, which he asserted were responsible for the January incident and others.
The nominee said he would “work closely with the professional men and women of the FAA to provide the leadership that is necessary to execute the president’s vision, to build a new, best-in-class air traffic control system and to rectify the chronic understaffing our nation’s peer centers.” He added, “to accomplish this we really can’t repeat the mistakes of the past. We can’t accept half measures.”
He further pledged to “reinvigorate the safety culture at the FAA” and said he intends to promote “transparency, frequent communication and radical accountability,” among FAA workforce and stakeholders.
Bedford piled on criticism of the FAA’s culture, claiming that after meeting with agency employees and leaders that they told him they had no goals and didn’t have a plan to improve air traffic control systems – many of which are failing and in need of modernization, according to the Government Accountability Office.
One proposal circulating among some Republicans has been to privatize aspects of the FAA – specifically air traffic control systems. When asked whether Bedford would consider privatizing the FAA, he dodged by saying “right now is not the time” to have the privatization conversation.
The privatization debate has slowed modernization progress and conversations focused on how to improve technology and air safety, Bedford said, explaining that “industry hijacked” the dialogue and “spent three years arguing about privatization as an opportunity to fix the system.”
“We shouldn’t have to lean into the second or third or fourth level of redundancy to keep the system moving,” Bedford said of the existing air traffic control systems. “The system is old. It needs upgrading, massive upgrading. So we have to do better.”
The $12.5 billion the White House has requested for those modernization efforts only marks a start on the necessary fixes, Bedford later told lawmakers.
On other tech-related priorities, Bedford said that while some European officials have considered allowing a single pilot to fly aircraft with the assistance of AI-like technology, the FAA is “a long ways away” from considering such a move, saying instead he sees “a combination of both” technology and human pilots working together.
“I don’t think it goes so far as to tell us we need to remove a trained aviator from cockpit,” Bedford said.
Bedford did commit to exploring more uses for AI in future airspace operations following a request from Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., to incorporate the technology. Bedford told the senator he would investigate using it for “safe cyber features.”