Top Senate Transport Dem: FAA Has to Be More Aggressive on Oversight

On Friday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” Senate Commerce, Science, Transportation Committee Ranking Member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) stated that the FAA must engage in more aggressive oversight.

Cantwell said, “Well, the FAA has the ultimate authority to always monitor the flight paths and systems and say what is safe and what is operational. That rests with the FAA administrator. I hope we will get an FAA administrator very soon, because I thought Mike Whitaker was doing a good job at trying to address our safety issues, and now we don’t have an administrator.”

She added, “Unfortunately, the FAA needs to be a more aggressive oversight agency. And in this case, what did the FAA think of this inner flight pattern between DOD and the air traffic controllers’ management at the airport, and what else were they dealing with? What else were the air traffic controllers dealing with? So, after the Challenger explosion, we put a bigger safety office at NASA. And it may be that there’s a need for a bigger safety office at the FAA to monitor these airport issues and give us an understanding of whether they think that they have the capacity to deal with this or they don’t. But, ultimately, it’s the FAA administrator’s determination, does that airport have a problem, does it need to change?”

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