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President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are under intense political pressure to get to the bottom of an issue at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that grounded flights Wednesday — and to prevent further snares in Americans’ air travel.
The FAA experienced an outage in the system that warns pilots of hazards during their upcoming flights, halting departures across the nation. While the system came back online a few hours later, the predicament came less than a month after Southwest Airlines canceled thousands of flights amid deadly winter storms, raising the focus on problems in commercial aviation.
Buttigieg said once flights resumed that he “directed an after-action process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.” Biden, meanwhile, told Buttigieg to report directly back to him when they learned the cause of the outage, and the administration has said that there has been no evidence of a cyberattack.
Republicans blasted the administration for the FAA meltdown.
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee member Garret Graves (R-La.) said on Twitter that lawmakers will “aggressively pursue accountability.”
And Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said “we need a new nominee” to run the FAA after the systems outage, arguing that the current pick, Phil Washington, has no experience in safety and aviation. Biden had selected Washington, the CEO of Denver International Airport, to run the agency, but there have been no hearings to confirm him. Former FAA head, Steve Dickson, resigned in March.
“The easy thing is going to be for either side to put blame on the administration, but we need to understand what the facts are related to what actually caused the issue,” Robert Mariner, a former Department of Transportation career official under Presidents Obama, George W. Bush, and Trump, told The Hill.
Both the White House and Buttigieg have reiterated that the flight groundings on Wednesday morning were out of an abundance of caution. Buttigieg quickly made the rounds on cable news and said that his primary interest is to ensure that this kind of a disruption doesn’t happen again.
“Certainly, when there’s an issue in the FAA that needs to get looked at, we’re going to own it. Same as we ask airlines to own their companies and their operations. But the bottom line for us is always going to be safety,” he said on CNN.
