Pete Buttigieg, the FAA, and the new politics of planes

Before the aircraft takes off, the pilot must read the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) which outlines the potential safety issues that may be encountered during the flight. Full of numerical codes and special acronyms, these critical digital messages include warnings about disturbances like bad weather conditions, traveling birds, and even nearby rocket launches. But as the outage that disrupted thousands of flights in the US last week made clear, the NOTAM system is also fragile.

The root of the problem appears to be the computer operating system that the Federal Aviation Administration has used to send NOTAMs for the past three decades. The FAA is still investigating what went wrong, but believes that “personnel” — reportedly two contractors who did not follow procedures — uploaded a corrupted file to the computer system that sent NOTAMs to pilots. The agency initially tried to fix the problem without causing a major impact on flight schedules, but ended up halting all takeoff flights in the US for more than an hour – a scale of disruption not seen since the agency grounded all flights during the period. 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This looks very bad for the FAA, which has been struggling to stay afloat financially and technically as the number of people flying continues to rise. Scrutiny of regulated agencies and airlines has only grown over the past few years, particularly amid a persistent pilot shortage, rising fuel prices, rising tensions over working conditions, and increasingly troubled IT systems. Now, whether the FAA can provide the aviation industry with the right correction depends on overcoming the growing politicization of, well, airplanes.

Unfortunately, the FAA’s fate rests with an increasingly chaotic Congress, which controls the agency’s funding. Earlier this month, a Republican member of the House of Representatives proposed setting up an Office of Advanced Aviation to develop a system better suited to future aviation technology, and the Senate Commerce Committee now plans to investigate how NOTAMs come about. The recent crash also drew attention to the fact that the FAA does not have a permanent administrator. President Joe Biden nominated Phillip Washington, the current CEO of Denver International Airport, back in July, but the Senate still hasn’t scheduled a confirmation hearing. Meanwhile, the FAA’s current authorization bill, which provides the funds the agency uses to do its work, will expire at the end of September unless Congress acts. The FAA’s current budget is less than it was in 2004, after accounting for inflation.

“This is hopefully a wake-up call for Congress to give the FAA the much-needed funding to help modernize the system,” Georgia Tech engineering professor and aviation expert Laurie Garrow told Recode. “As our transportation system has evolved — as we’ve gotten new threats, frankly, to our technology — this is needed as we push the boundaries of what the system can do.”

The FAA’s technical problems are not surprising. Last year, the agency requested nearly $30 million to overhaul the technology that supports the NOTAM system. There have been complaints from the aviation industry that NOTAMs have become obsolete, and that the messages are too long and overloaded with useless information. The manual backup system doesn’t look very good. After the NOTAM computer system went down last Wednesday, air traffic controllers were told they had to share any information they could send in a digital NOTAM verbally. Functionally, this means a return to radio and telephone transmissions — technologies the FAA used before the agency got computers.

There is further evidence that the agency is in need of a serious technological overhaul. Hundreds of flights along the East Coast were canceled in August 2015 due to technical problems at an air traffic control center in Virginia. And last year, the rollout of 5G threatened to disrupt the entire airline industry after the FAA raised concerns that the new wireless service could interfere with the radio altimeters used by planes when landing. Efforts have been made to update the air traffic control system and the National Airspace System (NAS), but the transition has encountered obstacles and is still ongoing.

The technical problem extends beyond just one federal agency. Hours after the NOTAM outage in the US, Canada’s air traffic management service experienced a similar problem. And last month, an even bigger failure of the aging software Southwest Airlines relied on to schedule workers led to the cancellation of thousands of flights, leaving passengers without flight crews and flight crews without passengers. This is not the first time the airline has dealt with technology issues.

Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

As Congress mulls the next move with the FAA, the debate over where to lay the blame is heating up on both sides of the aisle. Republicans are busy criticizing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a potential 2025 presidential candidate. But the Revolving Door Project, a research group that investigates corporate influence in the executive branch, has suggested that problems at the FAA may stem from the Trump administration — though it also notes that Buttigieg is responsible for “personnel decisions about who oversees the situation.” In response to the failure, Buttigieg said there should be “adequate safeguards built into the system” that a single person’s error or mistake could not have a major impact on US aviation.

“It’s been partisan since at least the 1950s,” Janet Bednarek, a history professor at the University of Dayton, told Recode. “Argument about what is the responsibility of the government? Is it the responsibility of the airline that uses this system or the private pilot that uses it? Politics has been there since the beginning, and then you throw it into the partisan political environment that it is today.

It’s unclear where the fight over the FAA’s future lies. While Democrats used the fiasco to reduce support for Biden’s candidate, Phillip Washington, Republicans still objected. The latest criticism is the emerging argument that Washington, a retired Army command sergeant major, does not technically qualify as a civilian. The law requires FAA administrators to be civilians or receive a “military exemption” from Congress.

Of course, there is also a reasonable explanation why NOTAM updates haven’t happened organically. The technology has been tested by time, and pilots know how to get around this system on the best and worst days. They can’t say the same thing they haven’t used.

“You know what can go wrong with the system you have,” explained Bednarek. “You never know what can go wrong with a new system.”

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