Three Republican senators suggest that trendy leftist ideologies have been distracting the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from key responsibilities, such as shoring up the computer system that went down last month, causing officials to order all U.S. flights grounded.
But Cruz and two Republican colleagues told FAA Acting Administrator Billy Nolen that it makes no sense for a safety-focused agency to work on changing gender-related terminology, mitigating “climate change” and ensuring “equity.”
One aviation-related document even discouraged using the word, “wife,” a senator said during the two-hour Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing on Capitol Hill.
Nolen denied that such issues were hampering the FAA’s overall progress.
“None of that ... detracts from our mission, which is the safety of our airspace, and that will always be our North Star,” he said, pointing to nearly 230 million flights in the past 14 years without a fatal accident.
But Cruz said he is worried about many recent “near-misses,” including one in his home state.
Two airplanes came within 100 feet of hitting each other because of an apparent air-traffic control mistake; the incident remains under investigation.
Democrats also expressed concerns about the implications of the computer system failure that caused Nolen to halt all U.S. air travel for two hours on Jan. 11.
“It doesn’t just hurt passengers. It also poses a national security risk, signaling to our adversaries that even a minor computer error can bring down domestic commercial flights for hours,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)
No Guarantee
Improvements to an FAA-controlled system that notifies pilots about weather and other flight-related conditions have been pending for a decade, Cruz said.That system used to be known as “Notice to Airmen,” but the name was recently changed to “Notice to Air Missions.” Known as NOTAM, that was the system that failed last month. Since then, Nolen said the FAA has added safeguards to prevent a recurrence.
“Could I sit here today and tell you there will never be another issue on the NOTAM system? No, sir, I cannot,” Nolen told Cruz. “What I can say is that we are making every effort to modernize and look at our procedures.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) got Nolen to acknowledge that, in December 2021, the FAA issued a 176-page “guidance” document about the NOTAM system’s name change.
When Vance asked whether changing “airmen” to “air missions” was done to avoid “the gender term, ‘airmen?’” Nolen said he believed so.
‘Too Politically Correct?’
That trend is inspired by Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration, Cruz said.“This administration’s desire to signal its virtue seems to know no limits. It’s even infected the FAA. Instead of focusing on safety ... we’re working hard to change NOTAM’s name,” Cruz said.
“I would suggest, instead, the focus should have been on making sure the damn thing worked,” he said, adding with sarcasm: “Shockingly, renaming NOTAM didn’t prevent an outage.”
But Nolen and Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) both said that changing the system’s name was a good move.
Noting that the name change could be criticized as “too politically correct,” Cantwell suggested that such changes might encourage more women to get involved in aviation.
She said that women make up fewer than 10 percent of licensed pilots, 5 percent of airline pilots, and 3.6 percent of airline captains.
In November 2021, the FAA held an “inclusive language summit,” during which an FAA official stated that using terms such as “airman” or “unmanned” aircraft sent a message that “only men belong in the aerospace community,” Vance said.
He apologized for interrupting himself, saying, “I’m laughing because ... this has to be a joke.”
‘Wife’ Should Be Eliminated
Vance also questioned Nolen about an aviation-related record that says the word, “wife,” is an example of “the type of language that we need to eliminate.”When Vance asked Nolen whether he supported that notion, Nolen replied, “I’d have to give that one some more thought.”
Vance retorted that he hoped everyone could agree that the word, “wife,” is one that most Americans find acceptable for use in daily life.
“It strikes me that we’re preoccupying ourselves so much with the words that we use, rather than the work that we do,“ Vance said, ”especially as our infrastructure appears to be crumbling, as we’ve had major flight outages the last couple of years.”
He suggested that anyone who is so thin-skinned as to be offended by words such as “wife,” or “cockpit” probably shouldn’t be a pilot.
“So rather than kowtowing to people who are fragile, maybe we should actually say, ‘If you’re so worried about the words that we’re using, you shouldn’t be flying, you know, multi-ton metal engines through the sky,’” Vance said.
Global Warming Or ‘Weirding’
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) told Nolen he takes issue with the FAA’s budget request for $2.4 million to embrace the Biden administration’s “priorities of mitigating climate change and increasing equity.”“Is that your job at the FAA?” he asked.
Nolen responded, “I believe it’s all of our jobs are to address climate change, and it’s one that we take seriously.”
He recently attended an international aviation convention, where the overwhelming majority of attendees “supported moving to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050,” Nolen said. “So, if you look out across the global community, it is one that’s staring us in the face, and it is one we must address.”
But Schmitt said he was disinterested in what the “global community” thinks. He wants to know the view of the FAA, “whose mission is supposed to be safe and affordable travel for the American public.”
Schmitt noted how the terminology has evolved.
“We went from global warming to climate change to now a climate crisis. And in my view, that is meant to stoke fear and empower unelected bureaucrats to do things that are not authorized by law, because it’s a quote-unquote, ‘emergency.’” That was what happened with the coronavirus pandemic, Schmitt said.
However, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) holds an opposing view. He suggested that the FAA might need to become more “expert” on climate change because of its effects on air travel.
During a hearing that delved into Southwest Airlines’ computer “meltdown” that led to cancellations of more than 16,000 flights in the wake of a late December storm, the airline said it lacked enough de-icing equipment in Chicago and Denver. That “is like saying you don’t have enough baseballs to open the season at Fenway Park,” Markey said.
“So, obviously, they didn’t anticipate what was unfolding,” he said. “And a lot of it is as a result of climate change, as a result of global warming.”
He said Burlington, Vermont, “is seven degrees warmer in the winter than it was just 50 years ago.” And there are other places with temperature anomalies, too, Markey said.
“It’s not just global warming; it’s Global Weirding,” he said, and that’s why the aviation sector needs to “adapt the system to the craziness of the weather.”
Nobody Reads the Notices
Two senators who are pilots focused strongly on the NOTAM problem.Tedd Budd (R-N.C.) said “broader issues” with the NOTAM system can be summed up by an exchange between air traffic control and a pilot at the Newark Airport.
As a pilot was taxiing his airplane and preparing for departure, the air-traffic controller told him about the nationwide ground stoppage and asked whether he’d read a NOTAM notice about it.
“No. Nobody reads NOTAMs,” the pilot said.
Budd said: “Well, maybe that’s because the NOTAM system is not designed in a user-friendly way. It does not prioritize important items. And it delivers it in a printed code that is optimized for teletype machines instead of plain English.”
To illustrate the problem, Budd printed a NOTAM for a flight from Washington, back to his home airport near Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“It’s a 90-page document for a simple flight about an hour long. If I didn’t review the list closely, I might have missed the NOTAM for a runway closure in my designated alternate airport.”
He cited another important warning that appeared on page 53 of a 276-page briefing.
Single Point of Failure
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) said that she, like Nolen, had served as an army pilot. And in that capacity, “one of the things that you learn is that a safety system should never be left vulnerable to a single point of failure. Never.”“Redundancy saves lives; we know that. That’s why I am very alarmed that a single contractor could crash the automated NOTAM system by simply deleting files,” Duckworth said. “That sounds like a single point of failure to me, and I would love to understand it better.”
Earlier in the hearing, Nolen explained that the NOTAM system has three backup systems. But all three of those systems update when the main system updates. Thus, when a mistake is made in one system, it is copied across all the backups, he said.
To avoid that problem, the FAA started using “a one-hour synchronization delay between the primary database and the backup database,” Nolen said.
Answer Needed in a Week
Cantwell, the committee chair, directed Nolen: “I want to get an answer within a week about the NOTAM system having a separate backup, totally separate backup.”That’s what is needed until the entire system can be upgraded, she said.
A 2021 Inspector General report said the FAA was struggling with integrating new technologies, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) noted.
Nolen replied: “I would push back against the notion that the FAA is in any way wavering on our mission to make our airspace which is the most complex in the world, as efficient as we can.”
The FAA is “halfway” done with its modernization plan, Nolen said.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said, “I’m deeply concerned about the FAA’s slow progress on next-gen, despite robust funding—from Congress and numerous legislative directives from this committee.”
“By the time many of these initiatives you’re talking about are completed, they’re going to be already outmoded, obsolete, in comparison, to the latest technology,” Thune said.
