Sen. Cruz Questions the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration

Administrator, welcome. In the days following the January midair collision at DCA, Secretary Duffy took bold steps to ensure safety of the airspace. He closed Helicopter Route 4 and revised existing memorandums of agreement with DOD, DOJ, and Coast Guard to require ADS-B out usage. I commend the administration for immediately taking aviation safety seriously and taking these key steps to ensure that the DC airspace is safe. Just moments ago, the Senate passed the Rotor Act, bipartisan legislation unanimously supported by this committee and now unanimously passed by the full Senate. The Rotor Act will require all aircraft, military and civilian, to receive ADS-B in signals, something the NTSB has recommended for decades and the FAA, as recently as 2023 under President Biden, has declined to recommend. In your judgment, how would universal ADS-B in adoption enhance safety? Well, I hesitate to comment on pending legislation in my current role, but I will tell you as an airline pilot, as a general aviation pilot, as a former CEO of a commercial airline, any additional awareness, situational awareness on the cockpit is a welcome initiative. As we've discussed many times, I was with you when you introduced the Rotor Act on the dais along with many family members and the Secretary, and we were supportive then. We continue to be supportive now with the modifications that you've introduced into the legislation, at least as I understand it. So I hope we have an outcome where the general aviation community, which we'll continue to support in our efforts for confidentiality and for portability of systems, I hope we can find broad support for this. Terrific. I very much appreciate that. There's effectively two options with ADS-B in. Onboard avionics, so that alerts and information is directly available to the pilot, and workarounds like iPad apps, so you can see and hear. That probably works well for a GA pilot, general aviation pilot, but not so well for most commercial or military aircraft. Can you talk about how you might view approval of these workarounds for certain kinds of aircraft? Well, thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman. I think there's a third element that we need to also consider, and that is the rapid adoption of high broadband satellite-based communications between aircraft and the ground. And so what we have now is an opportunity to integrate the three elements, the plane with an iPad solution with high-speed broadband connectivity to the plane in real time that will allow us to find ADS-B and like solutions that will give us exactly the same type of safety results that you're trying to achieve here today. So let's shift to air traffic control. So much of air traffic control system is predicated on the limitations of technology from a particular era. Two good examples. The FAA has struggled to close an understaffed TRACON on Long Island that covers the approach for New York City airports. It didn't have to be on Long Island. In fact, the FAA wanted to move it to Philadelphia, but ran into political opposition for years. There are more than 20 air route traffic control centers, ARTCs. They cover traffic at really high altitudes. ARTC's locations and coverage is based on radar from the 1960s. It strikes me that this entire operation is more than a little outdated. How can the FAA best go about facility modernization or consolidation given constant political interference with your decisions? Well, again, thank you for the question. It's delicate, right? One big, beautiful bill gave us $3 billion to examine and look at consolidation of facilities both TRACONs and in route centers, and I'm confident we'll be able to begin to deploy that investment next year and start to articulate a more refined strategy. But of course, these aren't just facilities, there are people involved here, and we want to be considerate of the people factor as well. We want to retain our critical safety professional workforce with our controllers, our technicians, and our inspectors. But I would agree that we should not carry the old architecture into the future. We do not need to think about the world between TRACONs and in route centers. We need to think about what it is, it's surveillance centers. Whether they're doing high, low, or all the above, it represents an opportunity to drive greater efficiency, frankly, and greater safety in terms of how we move aircraft in space more efficiently, more strategically. And how would you characterize the progress that FAA has made this year with air traffic control modernization, and where do you expect to go next year? Well, again, thank you for the question, and I think this hopefully won't frustrate you too much. We started with a highly prescriptive 680-page document that was placed in front of me on July 10th when I onboarded. So they were ready to actually get going. In consultation with the secretary, we both agreed that we should scrap that plan because it represented more of the same. We were going to run the exact same FAA playbook that we'd ran for the last 20 years. So we decided to actually invoke a think slow, act fast mentality. We hired outside legal counsel, we got help to actually create a strategy of what the end state of the NASH should look like, bring back the work packages to here and now as part of our onboard event integrator. So I think we have an excellent, articulable strategy to find work packages in a timeline now where we'll deliver on the promise of modernization and we'll do it by the end of 2028. In terms of where we're at today, we didn't stop. We didn't slow down. We took what was an existing 20-year FAA telecom modernization strategy that would complete in 2028, and we compressed that into two and a half years, to be honest. And to tell you whether that's successful or not, I'll tell you prior to onboarding, we had converted a little over 900 facilities from copper to fiber. And in the last six months, we've converted 950 facilities from copper to fiber. So we absolutely can move quicker, much quicker, and we can get the telecom piece done in two and a half years. Thank you. I now recognize Ranking Member Cantwell.