Everyone wants answers on whether it’s safe to fly — including senators.
The public is on edge over recent high-profile accidents, including the crash between a helicopter and a passenger flight near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The cause of the deadly crash is still unknown, but lawmakers say it’s made clear that this is an area where safety needs to tighten up.
Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, which has one of the largest Federal Aviation Administration field facilities in the country, told NOTUS the FAA still needs more air traffic controllers because “as was highlighted three weeks ago in the crash, it’s incredibly important that people are there.”
But there’s plenty of concern about how the Trump administration’s broader goal of scaling back the federal workforce could translate to the FAA.
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The FAA laid off several hundred of the workforce’s 45,000 employees at the Trump administration’s direction, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy arguing that the staff released were all probationary and not “critical safety personnel,” like air traffic controllers.
But on Friday, Politico reported that those cuts did include workers critical to ensuring safe air travel, often by directly supporting air traffic controllers’ work.
Lankford said he was still waiting for the FAA to “articulate” where the layoffs happened and said it’s too early to see if these layoffs will deter new applicants to the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City.
Other senators showed concern about the layoffs.
“The FAA is going to have to become way more accountable,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, a Republican, said. “I fly in Florida all the time, and unfortunately, the FAA often is understaffed and not able to handle all the traffic.”
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia told NOTUS he was closely monitoring the cuts.
“We’re all concerned about safety. And I’ve talked to people, and people are nervous,” Warnock said.
A spokesperson for the FAA said in a statement to NOTUS it is not concerned about the layoffs causing safety issues or dissuading people from joining the profession, adding that it will remain “proactive, consistent and deliberative” in advancing “the safety of the nation’s aviation system.”
“The FAA continues to hire and onboard air traffic controllers and safety professionals, including mechanics and others who support them,” the FAA said in a statement. “The agency has retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”
There’s plenty of pressure on the FAA to ensure safe flight travel, and there’s even some rare bipartisan consensus on what needs to be addressed. Both parties, for example, agree that air traffic controllers are crucial, and that something must be done to stop the years-long exodus from the profession. Duffy has even expressed support for letting them work past the mandatory retirement age.
The Professional Aviation Safety Specialist union, which represents more than 11,000 (mostly FAA) employees from both the FAA workforce and the Department of Defense, told NOTUS last week it is still trying to get a list of all the employees who were laid off from the administration.
But the union did have its own list of members who had been laid off, which included 59 people who worked in technical operations, 39 in flight standard service, 19 from mission support services and 15 in air traffic services.
Philip Mann, who used to train probationary employees as an FAA Training Program Manager in Oklahoma City, told NOTUS that the layoffs could mean longer tenured mechanics will have to make up the work of the laid off probationary employees, adding to the burnout and stress that already exists in the industry.
“What we’re going to see is, as those people kind of start retiring out or as those people kind of start just aging out of the system, basically, we’ll start seeing the maintenance capacity of the maintenance and supervision capacity of the agency start to be stretched,” Mann said.
Some lawmakers shared Mann’s concerns about what the layoffs could mean for future recruiting into the industry, which the Wall Street Journal reported is considered the largest civilian operating agency in the federal government.
“It’s certainly going to discourage people from joining that important workforce, or really any other,” Sen. Adam Schiff told NOTUS. “Air traffic controllers are overworked and stressed, and cutting their budget and reducing their workforce is going to make that much worse.”
Some Republican senators were confident that no problems would come of these layoffs.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said his state — that heavily relies on its aerospace industry to drive its economy — has “had no problems.”
“Everything’s good,” Tuberville told NOTUS. “A good evaluation never hurt anybody.”
Sen. Ted Cruz agreed that the cuts aren’t substantial enough to have an impact on his state.
“I don’t anticipate any impacts,” he told NOTUS regarding travel to and from his home state of Texas. “The secretary of transportation has made clear that the cuts were less than 1% of the entire workforce, and they did not include any air traffic controllers or any safety critical position.”
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Em Luetkemeyer and Torrence Banks are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch.
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