Tag: faa
Trump Gutted Aviation Safety Panel Days Before Potomac Crash

Trump Gutted Aviation Safety Panel Days Before Potomac Crash

President Donald Trump scrapped an aviation safety committee that had been in place for more than three decades, just a few days before a deadly airplane crash at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night.

Officials have said they believe all passengers onboard an American Airlines jet that collided with an Army helicopter over the Potomac River were killed. D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John Donnelly told reporters, “We are now at the point where we are switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation.”

Among the passengers on the jet were a group of figure skaters and their coaches on their way home from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas.

On Jan. 21, his second day in office, Trump sent a memo to members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee telling them that their membership had been eliminated. The committee made recommendations to the FAA on issues relating to travel safety.

The Trump memo said the gutting of the committee was being done as part of a process of “eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that [Department of Homeland Security] activities prioritize our national security.”

The committee was formed by Congress after the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people in 1988.

Kara Weipz, president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, criticized the announcement in a statement. “Today’s action by the Trump Administration will undermine aviation security in the United States and across the globe.”

As part of an ongoing effort to upend civil rights gains, Trump also issued an executive order ending diversity recruitment programs at the FAA. The order went out even though the FAA has experienced a shortage of critical air traffic controllers for years.

Tennesse Garvey, who worked as a pilot for 22 years, told NBC News at the time, “It’s incredibly astonishing within this industry, where the goal is to promote aviation safety, that they are getting rid of programs that can help with safety.”

In addition to the elimination of the safety committee, the FAA is currently without a director. Michael Whitaker was supposed to serve a five-year term after being appointed in 2023. Trump megadonor Elon Musk pushed for his ouster after Whitaker fined Musk’s SpaceX for safety violations and Whitaker left on the day Trump was inaugurated.

Conservatives have long advocated for small government, while also pushing to stop government advocacy in favor of diversity and civil rights. With Trump’s actions, the right elevated these concerns despite the safety implications—and now the families and loved ones of the National Airport crash will have to deal with the fallout.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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.

Continue reading

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

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