Airlines Confidential host and former Wall Street Journal airline reporter Scott McCartney had a fascinating discussion with FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford this week. I was enthusiastic about Bedford’s appointment to the role.
I am concerned with some of the rewriting of history he seems to do here – it seems far less than candid – and by his seeming desire to take greater government control over airline scheduling.
The First Trump Administration Wanted To Privatize Air Traffic Control, Now They Don’t, Why The Switch?
The first Trump administration worked on spinning off air traffic control into a stakeholder non-profit, along the lines of NavCanada. Here’s Bob Crandall (also on Airlines Confidential) blaming lobbying by private pilots for killing the effort that would have done more than anything else to improve performance and safety.
Bedford rewrites the narrative, leading off with an homage to President Trump (“in order to do big projects, you have to have strong leadership, strong vision”) and he says Trump was going to modernize air traffic control but that got hijacked by the airline industry and turned into a privatization debate. That’s a bizarre rewrite of history. Here’s President Trump announcing his air traffic control initiative,
At its core, our new plan will dramatically improve America’s air traffic control system by turning it over to a self-financing, non-profit organization.
He framed the FAA’s continuing role as safety oversight, not air traffic control operations:
The Federal Aviation Administration will focus firmly on what it does best — safety.
And he argued the separate entity would improve operations:
A separate non-profit entity would be charged with ensuring route efficiency, timely service, and a long-awaited reduction in delays.
A month later, he was clear his goal was to “transform our air traffic control services into an independent, non-profit organization.”
Trump’s Secretary of Transportation echoed this: “Air traffic control operations will be split, will be moved to a non-governmental independent, non-profit cooperative…the air traffic control system will be liberated from government constraints.”
The only possibilities I can see here in Bedford’s narrative about the history of air traffic control reform during the first Trump administration:
- Bedford doesn’t know what he’s talking about
- Bedford is being disingenuous
- Bedford thinks Trump didn’t actually want what he said he wanted, and is easily manipulated.
Number 1 and 2 reflect poorly on Bedford, number 3 is my Straussian take on his performative opening praise on the President. Making obsequious statements about the President creates room to implicitly criticize him.
The Problem With Air Traffic Control Wasn’t Just Who Was In Charge
Beford says the problem with air traffic control modernization became that “the Biden Buttigieg administration hated airlines.” But the problem is much more fundamental.
- Having the same entity regulating safety and providing service creates a conflict of interest. The FAA is its own regulator, which is a recipe for no accountability.
- The way they’ve done procurement for decades has been in long-term cycles, spending years specing projects instead of buying off-the-shelf software like the rest of the world. They depend on the vagaries of congressional appropriation cycles, rather than being able to issue bonds to make capital investments and charge fees to airlines for the service to cover that cost.
- And you get political interference in recruiting and training controllers.
That’s not just about spending money to replace aging equipment (and DOT hasn’t been great about maintaining the equipment they have). Indeed, Bedford acknowledges that it’s not just replacing obsolete equipment, but focuses on redesigning airspace and rethinking staffing and controller workload.
He blames the airlines, though, for air traffic congestion because they build their schedules around what customers want rather than what the status quo system can absorb.
The FAA is using AI tools to do a better job using airline schedules to forecast system overload. The solution, though, needs to be improving air traffic system throughput and staffing to travel patterns. And it certainly doesn’t work to start with current capacity as fixed and have the government parcel out flights to airlines based on that.
San Francisco Capacity Is Being Limited Because Of Palantir’s Systems
Bedford reveals that San Francisco parallel approach restrictions were the result of risks flagged by Palantir. The FAA now bars side-by-side visual approaches to the east-west parallel runways, 28L/28R (which are just 750 feet apart), even in clear weather and even when both crews report the other aircraft in sight. The new rule requires staggered approaches, one aircraft ahead of the other, and this limits capacity at the airport cutting maximum arrivals from 54 to 36 per hour.
What seems to have happened is a lot of false alerts about aircraft too close when there wasn’t any real safety risk. And parallel arrivals are being banned, but not parallel departures, because the same alerts weren’t coming up on departure (for technical reasons these are inhibited below 1,000 feet). Palantir may have flagged an issue that triggers a lot of alerts, and it’s low hanging fruit achieving metrics that correlate with safety rather than actual safety.
We Need More Controllers, But We Also Need Better Scheduling
Addressing the controversy over the FAA reducing its projected need for air traffic controllers, he says they have about 11,000 today and are accelerating hiring, but that they have a producitivity and scheduling problem.
Different facilities have different locally built schedules, controller transfer rules create staffing imbalances between faciltiies, and the agency does not have enough useful data on work spent on actual time-on-position. He frames this as hiring more, but ending the waste of controller capacity, rather than doing more with less. The problem is this gets back to having the FAA run air traffic control – it remains a political football, and Senator Chuck Schumer blocked controller assignment fixes for years.
He says we’re going to see facility consolidation at least as a test. And I’d argue we clearly need more remote towers to use controller staffing more efficiently.
The FAA Wants More Centralized Fixes To Air Traffic Control
Bedford’s view is that American air travel is delayed and made riskier because the FAA has been running a fragmented, analog-era system in a reactive fashion. He wants to move it toward a digital, centrally-optimized, more tightly-controlled airspace.
But when he says that the FAA lacked focus and accountability, producing five-year plans that no leader would ever be accountable for, he misses that centrally planning the airspace and continuing to have the FAA regulate itself is hardly a recipe for solving this.
Sounds to me like a proposal to bring back the Civil Aeronautics Board.
I think the article conflates for-profit privatization with the world of non-profit, stakeholder managed groups. The latter would include organizations like credit unions, Habitat for Humanity and community food banks which are mission driven and governed by consensus of the stakeholders. Bedford is distinguishing between a take over by a for-profit corporation versus what was actually proposed.
Bedford has always been a chump. From his days at Business Express, Mesaba, Chautauqua, Frontier, Midwest Express (and their pilot suicides caused by him), Republic. He has been totally self serving and every possible way. Of course he will rewrite history to benefit him or his cronies. On top of all this BS he thumps his Bible. Wow! What an A-Hole!!!!!
Airlines want to bank flights and have flights leave at optimal times. Few want to arrive in London at 4AM or arrive in NYC at 7PM. So that means stress on larger airports which translates into lack of gates, long taxis, multiple holds and incoming flights being slowed down in speed because of landing and take off congestion. All of that translates into passenger frustration. Landing and taxing to the gate at ORD and taxing can be a real adventure in itself.
It was only discussed briefly but there was also mention of SFO and the restriction on parallel approaches.
Although there has been talk of permanent damage to UA’s SFO hub efficiency, Bedford said new offset approach procedures would bring the capacity back.
The kakistocracy is alive! The FAA doesn’t regulate itself, Gary; Congress has oversight, should they grow a spine and choose to use it. I recommend we elect better people, say, in about 158 days. (Privatization benefits no one but the AA-DL-UA oligopoly.)