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Emails Show Current FAA Chief Coordinated Policy With Airline Lobbyists

Emails Show Current FAA Chief Coordinated Policy With Airline Lobbyists

More than two years ago, the man who is now acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Dan Elwell, got a work email from one of his former lobbyist colleagues. She wanted an update on the airline industry’s push to roll back rules on mishandled baggage and extra fees, among other Obama-era regulations.

“We are anxious to know when we’ll have a yes or no,” wrote Sharon Pinkerton, the top lobbyist for Airlines for America, in a Feb. 3, 2017, email.

Elwell, a former airline lobbyist himself who had worked with Pinkerton at Airlines for America, wrote back 31 minutes later. He said he had “checked with” the Department of Transportation’s top lawyer. “We’ll keep an eye on them.”

Elwell was working at the time on a secretive deregulation task force. Weeks after the emails, the industry got a yes and the regulations were nullified.

A month later, Elwell initiated another exchange. He emailed JetBlue executives, asking them for help with “an airport privatization issue.” He later asked if the airline had “any luck finding a JetBlue exec we can throw to the lions, er, I mean, introduce to a nice reporter to say nice things about airport privatization?” JetBlue, the airline lobbyist and the FAA then coordinated on talking points for a story about privatizing management of St. Louis Lambert International Airport.

Political appointees typically aren’t allowed to participate in issues that involve their former employer or clients they have worked for, as part of President Donald Trump’s ethics rules. But the rules did not apply to Elwell during his first few months at the FAA when he worked on the deregulatory team.

He had been classified as a kind of government consultant — a “special-government employee” — who isn’t bound by the ethics rules.

In a statement, the FAA said that Elwell “has no reportable conflicts of interest” and, as a special-government employee, “he was subjected to and complied with the same, stringent requirements and was engaged in no activities that posed a conflict of interest.” (Read the agency’s full statement.)

Airlines for America said in a statement: “As the voice of the U.S. airline industry, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t interact with certain regulatory and legislative agencies that work regularly with the carriers we represent. It is our responsibility to educate and communicate with organizations that work to make this the safest aviation system in the world.”

Elwell’s designation as a special-government employee also allowed him to continue his private consulting business even as he worked for the government. It’s unclear if Elwell did that. Virginia state records show his business was still incorporated through April of last year, but his financial disclosures don’t list any private income while he was in government.

What is clear is that Elwell continued strategizing with his former lobbyist colleagues even after he was no longer a special-government employee and rose up to the top ranks of the agency.

Elwell was named the FAA’s deputy administrator in June 2017. A month later, Pinkerton emailed Elwell, asking him to “weigh in on directly” on compliance issues contained in the FAA’s five-year funding bill.

Elwell wrote back that he would be “Happy to do it,” and he asked a subordinate to help “set it up.”

The emails offer a detailed picture of the tight connections between the airline industry and the government, while the FAA is facing increased scrutiny over its oversight after two crashes of the Boeing’s 737 Max.

“These emails underline why there’s a prohibition on private communications between new federal officials and old lobbying clients,” said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “The tone, the clubbiness. The issue is that the inside group appears to be not the flying public. The inside group appears to be the airlines.”

Unlike most other oversight agencies, the FAA has a dual mission to both regulate and promote the airline industry, a combination that many observers have criticized as an inherent conflict.

Elwell is scheduled to testify Wednesday afternoon at a Senate committee hearing on airline safety. The emails were provided to ProPublica by the nonprofit Democracy Forward Foundation, which obtained them following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit last year with the Transportation Department.

Elwell began his career as a military pilot before spending 16 years flying for American Airlines. After stints on Capitol Hill and at the FAA during the George W. Bush administration, Elwell worked for two industry groups, including at Airlines for America. He started his own firm, Elwell & Associates, in 2015.

Elwell’s federal financial disclosure list his earnings at his consulting firm as $282,500 in 2016 and 2017 combined. It’s not clear who paid him. His federal financial disclosure forms do not identify individual clients, though doing so is required by law. “That’s garbage,” said Clark, the ethics expert. “The rules are clear. He should have reported those.”

The FAA did not respond to questions about the omissions. The disclosure estimates his net worth at between $2.1 million and $7.8 million.

After Elwell arrived back at the FAA under Trump, his wide-ranging email discussions with industry players included a push by lobbyists to intervene in government research.

In May 2017, the FAA’s assistant administrator for government and industry affairs, Katherine Howard, asked two of her government colleagues about the number of communities that had lost air service since deregulation. After wondering whether airlines might have the data, someone forwarded the email to Pinkerton, the airlines lobbyist.

Pinkerton forwarded the email chain to another Transportation Department official, Geoff Burr, who is also a former lobbyist, writing: “I share this with you as I believe we have a problem with the folks at the bottom of the chain…I’m a bit skeptical about why these chicas are urgently trying to answer this question.” Pinkerton seemed to referencing Howard and her two, female colleagues.

Elwell was then looped in and said he would look into it. (Elwell, Pinkerton and Burr did not respond to questions about the exchange.)

The emails also show Elwell’s admiration for industry players during some of their more challenging moments. He chimed in after United was forced to apologize in the wake of a viral video showing a passenger being physically dragged from a flight to make room for the airline’s own employees.

In an exchange with a United official following the confidential settlement between the airline and the passenger, Elwell wrote: “Looks like you guys have really taken leadership on this.”

“Crossing my fingers for a denied boarding flight. 😁,” he continued, an apparent reference to the kicked-off passenger getting a settlement.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

 

Crashing: Trump Shutdown Delayed Crucial Software Fix In Boeing 737 Max

Crashing: Trump Shutdown Delayed Crucial Software Fix In Boeing 737 Max

Trump’s reckless shutdown of the federal government delayed work on the software malfunction believed to play a role in the crash of a Boeing 737 Max jet.

On Sunday, 157 passengers were killed after Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The disaster has been traced to a flawed automated anti-stalling system that also played a role in the crash of another Boeing 737 Max jet in the ocean near Indonesia on Oct. 29.

Before the latest crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was aware of problems with the system and was reportedly working with Boeing to remedy the issue. But because of Trump’s decision to shut down the federal government to try to make Congress fund his racist border wall, work was completely stopped on the solution for five weeks.

This is exactly the kind of safety hazard that a union representing 60,000 airline pilots warned Trump about during the shutdown.

What’s more, Trump’s FAA has no permanent director and has been sluggish in its response to the crash. Trump only announced that the 737 Max would be grounded on Wednesday — days after most other governments around the world, including the European Union, had already done so.

While the rest of the world was responding to the safety hazard, Trump was on the phone listening to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s assurances that he was confident in the safety of the troubled jets.

Boeing also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and Muilenburg visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Even while announcing the grounding of the Boeing planes, Trump still plugged Boeing as an “incredible company.”

The FAA said in a statement that it delayed grounding the planes because “this investigation has just begun and to date we have not been provided data to draw any conclusions or take any actions.”

But the Canadian government received information about the Boeing plane at the same time as the United States did, and Canada called for a grounding many hours before the U.S. acted. Many flights using the possibly hazardous jets would have been allowed to take off during that time.

America was behind the rest of the world when the safety of air travel passengers was on the line.

Thanks to Trump’s management failures with the FAA and his pointless, ego-driven shutdown, the people responsible for keeping travelers safe haven’t been able to fully do their jobs when it mattered most.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

Google To Deploy Drones With Internet-Emitting Payloads

Google To Deploy Drones With Internet-Emitting Payloads

Last April, Google and Facebook engaged in a bidding tussle over the aerospace manufacturer Titan.

Google eventually won the battle, stating they would top all of the social media giant’s bids. (What they officially paid has not been publicly disclosed, although Facebook’s last offer was $60 million.)

As Ben Popper recently reported for The Verge, Google will begin conducting test flights of drones produced by Titan.

Invested in connecting people worldwide, whether in rural areas or in third-world population centers, Google looks to employ a “super-lightweight solar-powered airplane that would be capable of hovering in one area of the stratosphere,” writes Popper.

The drones are a counterpart to Google’s Project Loon — a program that develops high-altitude balloons that emit Internet-streaming signals. The extra bandwidth provided by the drones and balloons would deliver Internet access to underserved or disaster-struck areas on demand.

Google’s senior vice president, Sundar Pichai, sees the Loon program and Titan drones complementing one another “as a mesh of flying cell towers circling overhead,” according to The Verge.

Although it will take at least a few years of development and testing before the drones get off the ground, Google’s hope to bring the world’s four billion people under its umbra of “connectivity,” looms just beyond the horizon.

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According to a CNET report, the Federal Aviation Administration is looking into industry partnerships with drone operators. If the FAA loosens regulations — which currently prohibit the use of drone flights beyond the pilot’s line of sight — big businesses and entrepreneurs are expected to flock to the opportunity.

Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) supports the opportunities the technology presents for crop monitoring, railroad inspections, real estate scouting, and delivery services that airworthy drones would usher in.

Any changes in regulations would take at least two years to finalize, according to Forbes. But that isn’t stopping businesses from trying to streamline the process.

“I don’t know what triggered it. They’re talking to us and we’re collaborating,” said Google executive Dave Vos, talking about the government’s possible change of heart toward drones. It could be that the U.S. has more restrictions on unmanned flights compared to Canadian, Australian, or British policies, where commercial drone operators are permitted to practice long-range flights.

Yet even this amount of government cooperation pales in comparison to its expansive military use of drone technology. The feds are at once advocates of their own drone use abroad and opponents of the aircrafts’ non-violent uses domestically.

Apart from death tolls we hear on the news and John Oliver’s memorable jeremiad against the military use of drones, many of the notions of unmanned aircraft we receive come from car commercials, films, or short stories, preparing us for perhaps not-so-distant realities.

Screenshot via FlightBots/YouTube

Pilot Lands Gyrocopter At Capitol In Apparent Protest; Charges Pending

Pilot Lands Gyrocopter At Capitol In Apparent Protest; Charges Pending

By Christine Mai-Duc, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Business has returned to normal at the U.S. Capitol — or, at least, as normal as it might be after a man landed a gyrocopter just outside the building Wednesday in an apparent protest demanding campaign finance reform.

The tiny aircraft flew in low over the National Mall, whizzing past a row of trees and a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, as a group of onlookers stood by. Both houses of Congress were in session at the time.

Capitol Police said they detained Douglas Hughes of Ruskin, Fla., after he landed the craft on the West Lawn of the Capitol about 1:30 p.m. He has been moved to a cellblock, and charges against him are pending, they said.

The pilot was the only one on board the gyrocopter, said Shennell Antrobus, a police spokesman. A bomb squad found nothing hazardous on the craft, so it was moved to a “secure location,” police said.

Hughes claimed responsibility for the stunt on a website dedicated to what he called an act of civil disobedience. According to the site, Hughes aimed to personally deliver 535 letters by “air mail” to members of Congress. “The unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself,” Hughes writes in a letter, posted by the Tampa Bay Times. “I’m demanding reform and declaring a voter’s rebellion.”

Hughes said he was aware of the risk of being shot down as he approached the Capitol. “There is no way I can prevent overreaction by the authorities,” Hughes wrote, “but I have given them as much information and advance warning as my fuel supply allows.” Hughes added that before taking off, he had sent an email to President Barack Obama to try to convince authorities that “I am not a threat and that shooting me down would be a bigger headache than letting me deliver these letters.”

He took off more than an hour away from the no-fly zone over Washington, he wrote.

In 2013, Hughes was visited by Secret Service agents, Brian Leary, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said in an email.

“On October 4, 2013, the Secret Service obtained information from a concerned citizen about an individual purporting their desire to land a single manned aircraft on the grounds of the United States Capitol or the White House,” Leary said in an email. “That same day, the information was reported to law enforcement partners at the U.S. Capitol Police.”

Leary said the individual, whom he did not identify, was located and interviewed the following day in Ruskin.

The Secret Service had no prior warning Wednesday about the pilot’s plans, Leary said.

About an hour before the aircraft landed at the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon, the Tampa Bay Times published a story about Hughes, who had told the paper he planned to fly to Congress in his gyrocopter.

“If you’re reading this, Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from Ruskin, has taken flight,” said the Tampa Bay Times story, which was published at 12:11 p.m. local time. Hughes’ goal was to personally deliver a message to Congress to draw attention to the issue of campaign finance reform, the report said.

In a statement released after Hughes landed, the Tampa Bay Times told CNN that Hughes had contacted reporter Ben Montgomery last summer and discussed his plans to fly to the Capitol. The newspaper confirmed with Hughes and a co-worker that they had both been interviewed by the Secret Service at work.

In preparation for the mailman’s attempt, the Times sent Montgomery and a photographer to Washington. Montgomery tweeted photos of the aircraft, which appeared to hover over the heads of unsuspecting pedestrians.

Shortly after Hughes’ streaming of the flight went live, the newspaper published the story, it said. About an hour later, the paper called Capitol Police and the Secret Service to ask whether they were aware of Hughes’ flight; they said they were not. The gyrocopter landed a half hour later.

According to the website, which is registered to a Douglas Hughes of Ruskin, Fla., Hughes is married, has four children and has been flying gyrocopters for more than a year.

He grew up in Santa Cruz, Calif., and lives with his wife and 11-year-old daughter, he wrote.

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said the pilot did not have authorization to fly there and had not contacted FAA air-traffic controllers to inform them of his flight. “Airspace security rules that cover the Capitol and the District of Columbia prohibit private aircraft flights without prior coordination and permission,” the statement said.

The pilot could face civil and criminal penalties for flying near the Capitol, which is considered part of a national defense airspace. The FAA said it was working with aviation security partners in Washington to investigate the incident.

A White House spokesman said Obama, who was attending a town hall event in Charlotte, N.C., had been briefed on the incident.

The U.S. Postal Service confirmed that Hughes is employed as a rural letter carrier. The agency’s Office of Inspector General is “in contact” with postal management about the incident, a Postal Service representative said in an email.

(Times staff writer Ryan Parker contributed to this report.)

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Doug Hughes flies his gyrocopter March 17, 2015, near the Wauchula Municipal Airport in Wauchula, Fla. Hughes wants to shine a spotlight on campaign finance reform, so he wrote a letter of protest to every member of Congress with the intent to deliver them by flying through the no-fly zone and landing in front of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. (James Borchuck/Tampa Bay Times/TNS)