Congress’ big vote on air travel leaves out ‘many vexing issues’ — including the one you’re thinking about

Worries about chronic safety problems at Boeing have mushroomed since a door panel blew off on one of its jets in January — kicking off investigations, congressional whistleblower hearings and the resignation of its CEO.

Four months later, Congress is poised to pass a major aviation bill that does little to increase oversight of the company.

The nearly 1,000-page bill, which the House is expected to send to President Joe Biden’s desk Wednesday, will guide aviation policy for the next five years, including by reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration and allowing more drones and air taxis, within the crowded skies. But it takes only modest steps on other serious concerns plaguing air travel and does little if anything to crack down on allegations of slipshod quality at and lax federal oversight of Boeing.

Lawmakers said they need more time to study exactly what's gone wrong at the nation's biggest plane manufacturer before they legislate a fix. That outcome is a testament to both the complexities of America’s aviation system and the difficulties of getting substantive legislation through a bitterly divided Congress.

“Is it 100 percent what I would want? No. But that's what compromise is,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who chairs the Senate Commerce subpanel in charge of aviation, told POLITICO this month.

“It’s a good bill,” she said when asked whether the bill does enough to address an aviation system beset by a rash of near-collisions on runways and concerns about quality control at Boeing.

Aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzzetti said the bill “lacks a bit of what I would call immediacy.”

The bill steers the FAA in the right direction on a number of safety measures, such as controller staffing and ethics training for employees who oversee manufacturers, said Guzzetti, who has worked at the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board. But while it contains “a lot of studies and efforts,” he said, most of them wouldn’t yield potentially crucial data for “anywhere between six months to five years."

The bill takes action on a host of other fronts — including allowing five more long-haul, round-trip flights each day at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, over the objections of D.C.-area lawmakers who contend that will increase congestion and compromise safety. The additional flights were a popular item for other lawmakers from around the country, who typically shuttle between Washington and their districts twice a week.

The Senate passed the bill on Thursday. The House is expected to vote on it Wednesday after debating it Tuesday night.

Senate Democrats have pressed for months to get the bill done and have made an explicit choice not to use it to increase oversight of Boeing.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, has said problems at Boeing will be addressed in a separate bill. She said she didn’t want to slow down the broader aviation measure, which has already languished for so long that it needed four short-term extensions.

Even Duckworth, who has clashed with Cantwell on other issues, urged her colleagues to quickly pass the FAA bill, H.R. 3935 (118).

“This bill does not fully address the many vexing issues that have come to light since a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight mid-flight," she conceded in a floor speech this month. "Congress must look more closely at these issues … But that will take time, and this bill contains urgently needed fixes to address imminent safety risk. We must not delay passage of this FAA reauthorization while we continue our oversight of Boeing.”

Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance, who also sits on the Commerce Committee, agreed that there’s “a lot more that could be done” in the bill. But he also conceded that dealing with Boeing is “going to take a lot longer.”

“It was never going to be part of this particular FAA reauthorization,” he added.

But that’s a tall order, too. Duckworth acknowledged earlier this month that there likely won’t be another bill to address Boeing — at least not this year, due mostly to the compressed congressional calendar in an election year.

Though it contains little to address Boeing, the bill:

— Includes $105 billion in funding for the FAA over five years

— Attempts to shore up the FAA's air traffic controller workforce, which has been plagued with shortages and fatigue — long-running problems that worsened during the pandemic

— Mandates placing technology at more airports to help prevent airplanes from colliding with ground equipment — or each other

— Requires cockpit voice recordings to hold 25 hours of audio before being overwritten, up from two hours

— Forces the FAA to study whether plane design and operations — including seat size — are adequate to quickly evacuate passengers

— Mandates additional protections for people who fly with wheelchairs and other mobility aids, following years of complaints from passengers about the equipment being lost or damaged

A case of bad timing?

In some ways, the decision to move forward with a must-pass aviation policy bill minus anything addressing Boeing comes down to timing. Negotiations on the bill were already in the final stretch before January's Alaska Airlines door blowout, and lawmakers faced a choice of delaying that bill for months — maybe even years — as they figured out how to tighten oversight of Boeing or move the bill on without it.

David Soucie, an aviation safety analyst who worked for the FAA as an assistant manager in the safety oversight office, said it’s not unusual for Congress to respond to a specific event, such as the Alaska Airlines door plug incident, with legislation separate from broad recurring bills such as this one.

The last time Boeing was under a microscope, following two mass-fatality crashes of Boeing's 737 MAX 8 jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019, Congress responded with standalone legislation enacted in 2020. But that happened only after multiple probes, congressional investigations and court cases. That law required the FAA to implement major changes to how it oversees manufacturers like Boeing — some of which the agency is still putting into place.

The argument that reauthorization bills have “needed more teeth” every five years to direct the FAA to tackle specific issues has been “around since the beginning of time,” Soucie said.

And many lawmakers say they’re still learning about what is happening at Boeing and what needs to be done to fix it — including Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former member of Commerce who now chairs the Senate’s Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations.  

“I think there are more measures that need to be taken,” Blumenthal said. “I anticipate we'll deal with it separately if legislation is appropriate.”

Blumenthal’s subcommittee is in the midst of its own Boeing inquiry after a whistleblower at the company testified at a hearing about threats and intimidation from his supervisors for speaking up about shoddy practices at one of Boeing’s assembly plants.

Congress has held several hearings related to Boeing’s quality problems, and lawmakers have said they intend to hold more as they figure out their response. The chair of the House Transportation Committee, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), has said he wants to wait until the independent National Transportation Safety Board concludes its probe, which will take months longer.

Does the rest of the bill go far enough?

Retired Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who chaired the House Transportation Committee from 2019 until last year, said the bill does include some important provisions — including those intended to help the FAA hire more air traffic controllers, a job that’s chronically understaffed and overworked.

The bill requires the FAA to work with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union to set increased hiring targets and improve how facilities are staffed. Lawmakers hope those steps will stanch a recent uptick in near-collisions, some of which may have been caused by controllers.

The bill also provides more money for other safety-critical positions, such as aviation technicians, inspectors, engineers and others needed to oversee aircraft manufacturers.

“That’s critical,” DeFazio said in a recent interview. “What we heard during the investigation of Boeing … is that [employees] never ever saw an FAA inspector on the floor, which is unacceptable. You need people walking around.”

The bill also includes measures to increase inspections at foreign aircraft repair stations, which are increasingly being used by some U.S. airlines, and codifying requirements for secondary cockpit barriers on passenger aircraft to help safeguard pilots and flight controls against bad actors.

“Those are all good things for safety and security,” DeFazio said.

The bill would require more airports to install technology that can detect ground equipmentthat might have strayed onto a runway or other restricted area. But the bill gives five years for that to be rolled out.

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the independent National Transportation Safety Board, has called for more airports to be equipped with this technology. Homendy said last year that her agency has recommended for 23 years that airplanes should also be installed with equipment that notifies pilots of potential runway hazards, including other planes. 

Out of roughly 450 U.S. airports with scheduled passenger service, about 45 have technology that can detect ground hazards. The FAA is in the process of activating other surveillance technologies at dozens more, in addition to equipping ground vehicles themselves with location transmitters, among other steps.

But Guzzetti said the FAA already has a solid base of activities for runway safety, “and I think this bill augments that appropriately.”

Like some lawmakers, Guzzetti also believes the bill could have specifically targeted FAA oversight of manufacturing processes “in some fashion” and helped the FAA get past its own cumbersome approach to tackling concerns about approving aircraft as safe to fly.

Manufacturing oversight aside, the FAA’s organizational structure is not well-positioned to deal with the challenges facing the agency today, DeFazio said. That includes a need for more people with a specialized focus on drones and air taxis.

All of this makes the agency “inefficient and not optimal in terms of basically moving to the future and/or overseeing the industry,” he said.

Chris Marquette contributed to this report.