Thanks, Anil (Deolalikar, Dean of UCR School of Public Policy). It’s so good to be back, and it’s good to be home. I was telling Anil when we were walking up here that as a political science graduate from UCR, the prospect of walking into a building called the Genomics Auditorium was absolutely terrifying. But it’s great to see that the campus has grown so much and that there are so many things that have changed here, and to see so many vibrant students who are really the future of not only aviation but what we as a nation have to look forward to.

I’m going to talk about three things this evening. I’m going to talk about my own journey of how I got to where I am today and some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

I’m going to talk a bit about the challenges that we are facing as a nation in aviation and the things that we have to consider in the years ahead.

And then I’m going to talk a little bit about why we should be interested and why we need to invest in the next generation of public policy professionals, because this is something the country needs very, very badly.

First a little bit about me. I am very proud of my roots here in Inland Empire. I’m a second generation Riversider. My dad was also born here in Riverside, and I grew up just west of the city in what was then unincorporated Riverside County in a community called Rubidoux. I understand it’s now the city of Jurupa Valley. It really seems to have gone up in the real estate brokers’ eyes. When I was growing up, we lived in a place that was adjacent to a strawberry field, and the guy who ran the strawberry field would save the last row of strawberries for my sister to eat, which she did with great gusto.  

My dad, he didn’t finish high school, but he was drafted in World War II. He was a World War II vet, and he was active in the Pacific theater as a medic.  

My mom was a stay-at-home mom. But once she got us all into school, she went back to school and got an Associate’s Degree from Riverside Community College and became a librarian.  She served as the librarian at Ina Arbuckle Elementary School in the Jurupa Unified School District until she retired.

Now, my parents were big, big believers in the power of education. And they instilled in all of us a significant belief that what you are able to do is a function of what you are able to learn; and what you take the time to learn; and how you take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to you. And so, I went to high school at Notre Dame High School, and got involved in a program that was very international – and it was all about, you know, what’s the world all about? And I decided that what I really what to be when I grow up is probably a diplomat. I want to take the Foreign Service exam and I want to work in embassies all around the world. I thought that’s really what’s for me.

I came here to UCR and many of you have heard stories about what it was like at UCR in the 1970s. It was a very small place, about 5,000 students, graduate and undergrad. It was a wonderful place where you really got to know your professors and that’s still the case today, I know. But I happened to get to know a wonderful mentor, professor and friend, and that’s the former Mayor of Riverside Ron Loveridge. The mayor was my academic adviser, and when he heard the story about how I wanted to run off and be a diplomat, he suggested I do an internship.

And that internship that he suggested I do was at the redevelopment agency of the City of Riverside. And my first project that I got to work on was a parking lot. I learned about things like tax increment financing which was really big in the 1970s and which was used a lot by cities and counties to finance all kinds of great facilities.  And then Proposition 13 came in and that was kind of the end to that as a viable financing mechanism for a lot of communities. But what Professor Loveridge suggested that I really needed to get was a broad-based understanding of the full scope of public policy challenges.  

So I helped to develop a parking lot, with tax increment financing for the City of Riverside. But what I learned about in that internship was that cities are a wonderful laboratory where great things happen and where a lot of really good work takes place. Important public policy questions get dealt with because you are right at the center of what citizens deal with every day. Sometimes it’s about the garbage getting picked up. Sometimes it’s about why is that traffic light not working, or why is that street light burned out? But, that stuck with me. What stuck with me is that cities are really important places, and really an important and vibrant part of how you develop an economy and how you really make profound change in our country.

Well, after I finished here at UCR in 1978 I got a BA in political science, and I still wanted to pursue that dream of being a diplomat. I was fortunate to be accepted into Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. I enrolled in the masters in public affairs program in the concentration of international relations. I learned a lot about all the great international organizations. And then I had my first opportunity to go to work in an embassy. I spent my summer internship between my two years at the United States Mission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, Belgium. And I got to see that embassies are kind of boring places. It’s extremely important work, don’t get me wrong, because representing the interests of the United States in the international community is something we can’t take for granted. It’s a skill where you have to understand the nuance and sometimes the unwritten agendas of what is going on as you try to advance the U.S. diplomatic objectives. But things moved really slowly in diplomacy, and one of the things I learned was that I was looking for something perhaps a little bit more fast-paced. So I went back and finished my MPA program and I refocused it a little bit on international trade. When I left Princeton with my MPA the focus really became, how do I really develop a career around international trade.

Well, in the intervening years, I got a lot of great jobs.  I got to work on a U.S. AID project in the Eastern Caribbean – a tiny little country, newly independent, called the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, about 100 miles east of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. My job was to figure out how to attract U.S. companies to set up operations to create employment there.

One of the things you learn about when you live on an island is that ports are very, very important. It wasn’t long after that, that I received an opportunity to go work in one of the biggest ports of all as the Commissioner of Ports for the City of New York.  I worked for Mayor Ed Koch, who was one of the most transformative mayors that the city has ever seen. He brought New York back from the brink of one of the worst fiscal crises that any city had ever had and really restored in me the belief that it’s cities that can really do fabulous things.

I then moved to San Francisco, where I was director of the San Francisco Port around the time when we started to think about transportation as multi-modal. You can’t just think about roads. You can’t just think about transit. And I was the port guy who was saying, and we have to figure out how we connect our ports to the rest of the transportation infrastructure. So, all of the transportation planners got tired of my complaining about the lack of landside access to the Port of San Francisco and so they suggested and they recommended to newly elected President Bill Clinton that he hire me to figure out this intermodal transportation thing, which he did. So, I spent six great years in the Administration doing intermodal transportation, ending up as Chief of Staff for U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater. It was a wonderful experience, but that’s where I first got introduced to aviation, and what aviation has to bring to the table.

In between I did a couple of other things. I got to work for the Salt Lake Olympic Committee for about five years at an incredibly challenging time, and I’m going to come back to that a little bit later. And then ran a company, a transportation technology solutions company. Here in California you know our work as FasTrak. We are providers in the San Francisco area of the electronic toll program. In the East Coast we’re known as E-Z Pass. And we provide transit fare collection systems all over the world.

So you can take all of that, and you can draw a couple of conclusions. One conclusion you can draw from that is that I have been incredibly blessed with a wonderful variety of opportunities to do wonderful things with great people in many different capacities. Or you might conclude that I can’t hold down a job. But it’s probably somewhere in the middle. But I will say that I feel that I have been blessed to have had the opportunity to work with some of the best people as we try to deal with big, big issues and big compelling issues, which brings me to the FAA.

I’d like to talk a little bit about the FAA and what we do.

As you know, it’s an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation. The Secretary of Transportation is a member of President Obama’s cabinet. The Department of Transportation at the federal level does three things. The first thing that it does is that it regulates the safety of all the modes of transportation. And so that’s things like ensuring that roads are designed to the highest standards of safety; that operators of commercial vehicles are properly licensed; that pilots are properly certificated; that aircraft will meet the highest standards of safety. So we’re a regulatory agency.

The second thing that the Department does, is that it operates key parts of the transportation system. We run a small part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. And we operate the air traffic system.

And the final thing is that it is a funder of infrastructure. The federal government provides financial resources to states and localities all with the purpose of ensuring that we have world class transportation infrastructure that will support the economy and that will support our nation.

The FAA is the only part of the DOT that does all three of those things. And it’s also the only part of the DOT where the largest piece of what we do is the operating piece. And for us, that is the operation of our nation’s air traffic control system. In total, we have over 45,000 employees and about 15,000 are air traffic controllers. We have an additional 6,000 who are the technical specialists who actually make sure that the air traffic infrastructure can operate efficiently each and every day. We have about another 9,000 people who focus on making sure that airplanes and airlines are safe.

Every day in America tens of thousands of people get on airplanes. And what they’re thinking about are a lot of things. They’re thinking about the security line, bag fees and which snack they’ll get on the plane. But what they’re not thinking about is – is it safe? And that’s really a testament to the work that many generations of FAA employees have done over the years.

We make the rules that govern the safety of aviation. And we also have to figure out sometimes how we account for changes in technology. A lot of what we do is invisible. But a lot of what we do is very, very visible. It was about a year ago that we had probably the biggest announcement that we have ever made as an agency in my tenure, when we announced that we had changed the rules on the use of portable electronic devices on airplanes. You know, it’s kind of interesting how this one evolved. The original rule that was put in place that said you had to shut off your devices during critical phases of flight was developed about 50 years ago. It was intended to deal with transistor radios. Well, portable electronic devices have come a long way in the intervening 50 years, as have avionics that power airplanes.

But what we did is we brought a group of people together and said you’ve got to figure out a way to do something differently. And we brought a lot of science to the table and we determined that actually they didn’t present a hazard to most types of aircraft in most phases of flight. And so what we said is that it’s OK to use your portable electronic devices – not your phones – that’s a different problem – that you could use them during all phases of flight. There will only be one phase of flight where you may be asked to turn off your phone. If a pilot asks you to turn it off, you’re going to want to do it because it’s generally going to be that you’re in a really old airplane and you’re arriving in really bad weather. If you can’t see anything out the window and the pilot asks you to turn off your electronic device, do it.

Now more recently we’ve been focusing on a new evolution in technology and that’s unmanned aircraft. This is one of the fastest developing areas in aviation. And for us it represents some pretty significant challenges that we need to figure out how to work through. We figure that there will be thousands of these operating in the not too distant future within our national airspace system. But, where they will likely operate is in the same airspace that private pilots operate in. They bring a new paradigm to what has been a bedrock principal of aviation and that is a principle called see and avoid. Essentially, a pilot has the responsibility to ensure that she or he does not run into other airplanes. You need to see where they are and you need to take evasive action to avoid them. But if the pilot is not in the airplane that changes how that actually works, and there are a couple of important things.

The first is you have to make sure that the pilot is actually seeing what the aircraft is seeing. You have to make sure that you have the technological systems to deal with concepts like latency. If you’re in command of an aircraft, it takes a while for it to react, because the signal has to travel a significant distance. And you need to figure out how the pilots that are in the plane are going to interact with an unmanned aircraft. You also have to figure out, what is that aircraft going to do if it loses link with its base station. And you also have to be able to communicate that to all the other pilots that are operating in the system. So these are some of the challenges that we’re working through. We have been making good progress on it, but many who support unmanned aircraft think we’re not moving fast enough. But the important thing that we’re trying to do is to ensure the highest levels of safety, and for us, that is never something that we can compromise on. So those are some of the kinds of decisions that we make at the FAA that affect your travel experience and affect the future of our nation’s airspace.

Now the FAA was first created in 1958, when commercial aviation began to take off after World War II. And since that time, aviation has continued to grow. In fact, this year marks the 100^th anniversary of commercial aviation. Now, in that 100 years we have grown to 65 billion passengers who are paying for tickets worldwide. What do you do you think the forecast is for when we will add the next 65 billion passengers? It’s about fifteen years. And so what that really points to is the dramatic change that this industry is going through and how we as an agency need to adapt and relate to that.

Now that first commercial flight that we were talking about, it was a two-seat airboat and it flew from St. Petersburg, Florida to Tampa. The year was 1914. The former mayor of St. Petersburg paid $400 in an auction for the privilege of being on the first commercial flight. In today’s dollars that would be more than $9,000. The flight was from one side of Tampa Bay to the other. That’s pretty good revenue per mile on the part of that airline. It took 23 minutes, but it was a game changer because it was more efficient than the trip by train, which took about 11 hours. People really started to see the huge benefit they would receive from aviation.

Well, around the time that the FAA was created, was when we started to develop the base infrastructure for our air traffic control system that has served us well for so many years. We have a radar-based system that has provided for an incredibly safe system, but it’s about 50 years old. We have to modernize it and we have to replace it. But why are we doing that?

When you’re looking at radar, what a controller or a pilot who is looking at radar is seeing is targets at points in time. Those points in time are defined by the sweep of the radar. That can be a few seconds, or that can be as much as 20 seconds before a radar sees it again. So what you’re seeing is an aircraft might be here, and the next time you see it, it’s here. You are assuming where it has gone in between those points in time. The way we operate the system as a result of the limitations of radar is you have to plan for every conceivable place that aircraft could have gone in those few seconds. In our world those are called separation standards. That’s how we assure that we keep aircraft safely separated.

With the evolution of GPS technology, we now have a very different view of our national airspace system. Rather than looking at points in time, separated by many seconds, we now have a very precise, near real time view of what’s happening in our national airspace system all the time. It’s sort of like going from looking at an impressionist painting to HDTV. And what that means we’re able to do is we can move airplanes closer together and we can handle more traffic much more efficiently. And that’s how we’re going to handle those additional 65 billion passengers in the next 15 years.

But, we have some very old technology that we need to replace to enable us to do this. And that’s what the Next Generation Air Transportation system is. We call it NextGen. What we’re doing is we’re replacing our radar based system with a satellite based system – a technology called Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, or ADS-B. We’ve done a lot of work on this. Just this year, we completed the installation of the ADS-B infrastructure across the entire country. This improves precision tracking of aircraft and when combined with other technology, enables us to do some really cool things.  

In addition to ADS-B, which gives us a new system for tracking and navigation, we are also rolling out new satellite-based procedures that are easing congestion in our airspace. For example, earlier this year we turned on a new airspace redesign around Houston, Texas. The program is called Houston Metroplex. In one day, we turned on 61 new air traffic arrival and departure routes going into the metropolitan Houston area. What was different about it? As a result of using satellite-based technology, we were able to significantly increase the arrival capacity into the greater Houston area, and use a very different kind of procedure on the arrival side called an optimized profile descent.  What is that? When you are landing, have any of you heard the engines throttle up, throttle back, and throttle up and throttle back again?  What the airplane is doing is descending and leveling, and descending and leveling off. The profile of that aircraft arrival looks a lot like walking down the stairs. It is the aviation equivalent of stop-and-go driving in traffic. It is incredibly fuel inefficient. What an optimized profile descent is, is rather than going down the steps, you’re sliding down the banister. At the top of the descent, the engines are brought back nearly to idle and it practically glides down in a continuous descent. Every one of these new arrivals in Houston was an optimized profile descent. And on the departure counterpart, a similar, much more fuel efficient route. But what’s really exciting about this, is that in Houston, every year that’s going to amount to annual savings of about 3 million gallons of fuel.  And that translates to, in current fuel prices, to about $9 million per year in fuel savings. These are just on arrivals and departures in one metropolitan area. Think of the emissions that are being saved because the aircraft are burning so much less fuel. And that’s what this technology enables. We turned on the North Texas Metroplex just last month, and we’ll be turning on new procedures in Northern California early next year, and we’ll be doing this all throughout the country in the next few years. Now, everyone thinks this is a great idea. Everyone thinks we need to do more of this, but the problem is it costs a lot of money. And this is where we come to the challenges that we are dealing with at the FAA.

The FAA, like all of our government counterparts, is dealing with significant uncertainty and unpredictability. In our case at the FAA, we have been through a shutdown, we’ve been through a sequester, we’ve had our authorization from Congress to operate lapse, and this had been replaced by 23 short-term reauthorizations. And what that has led to is a great deal of instability in our ability to keep this program on track. We don’t know what our annual appropriations are going to be. Right now, we’re operating on an appropriations bill that’s only going to get us until December 11. After that, we don’t know what it’s going to look like. Hopefully, Congress will be supportive. But it makes it impossible for me to enter into a contract for anything beyond December 11. And that is a challenge, when you’re doing a long-term, multi-year, technology-based investment that is foundational and fundamental to supporting the economy of the United States.

What we as a nation have to figure out, is how are we going to get passed the gridlock and how are we going to get passed the challenges that we have had to deal with as a country, in order to figure out how we can create the stability we need to keep important programs like this going. I don’t think that’s really any way to run a government. We’re trying to build important infrastructure projects, and everyone agrees that you need a strong aviation system if you’re going to have a strong economy. So, what we’ve asked the aviation community, our stakeholders, to do is to figure out a way to come together, and we have made the point to them that we cannot be, as an industry, in a position where the interests of one sector, the airlines, might be traded off for the interests of another sector, the airports. Each sector has got to come together and really talk about what the needs of the industry as a whole are going to be. And, we have to figure out how we’re going to pay for it. We’re supported largely by the aviation trust fund, but those collections have been flat for the last few years. So, we need to come up with new ways to figure out how we’re going to pay for this industry that is so important to all of us.

Technology is evolving, and we as a nation need to evolve with it. We need to recognize that as we’re trying to modernize the system, that has served us so well, we need to figure out how we can build the public consensus that enables us to stay the course on the investments we have made, and to make new investments where we need to, in order to support this industry, which means so much.

Aviation underpins an industry that contributes about $1.5 trillion to our national economy. It’s a system made up of a lot of parts. It’s carriers, it’s manufacturers. It employs about 12 million Americans in all aspects of the aviation industry. And one thing I do know, is we can’t put that at risk. People might debate on an annual basis what the exact budget requirements of the FAA are, but I can tell you this. There is simply no way that the FAA can implement NextGen, and recapitalize our aging infrastructure, and continue to provide all the services we provide, without making some serious tradeoffs, and figuring out a new way forward and how we’re going to stabilize things in the future.

Now, the end to this story has not been written yet. I have appealed to industry leadership to join together to reach a consensus on where we should go, and we’re working all this year to present a proposal to Congress, hopefully early next year. So this is where I’d like to turn to you, the students, and appeal to you as you enter public service to start thinking about how you can build some coalitions that are going to help us figure out how we’re going to solve some problems like this.

There are some who question whether we as Americans still have the ability to do big and transformative things. I think it’s your job to prove them wrong. We can still do very, very big things in government. And we cannot back away from tackling the big challenges. But it’s getting harder and harder to do this because of very entrenched positions that many stakeholders have taken for many, many years. But you can be a very, very positive force for change.

How?

It’s because I know that many of you are open to forming communities of interest. You’re open to collaborating. And you’re open to exchanging ideas with people who aren’t necessarily going to agree with everything you say. What you need to do is use your ability to create coalitions to figure out how we solve these pressing problems that we have in government. Only by coming together and collaborating across the political spectrum will we be able to move public policy questions passed the entrenched positions and toward topics that interest most citizens. And those are pretty easy. Everyone wants a vibrant economy. Everyone wants to make environmentally sound investments. Everyone wants to have a great quality of life. And it shouldn’t be that hard to get there.

Now, if you’re wondering if a group of determined people can make a difference against entrenched interests, you may have heard the story about a showdown in Massachusetts over a super market chain. A company called Market Basket. Have you heard about this? This was an interesting story that developed earlier this year. There was a feud between two relatives, two cousins, one was on the board and one was the CEO. What resulted was the company’s board of directors fired the CEO and brought in new executives.  Well, the employees didn’t like that. The employees felt this was a CEO who cared about communities and cared about his employees. And so they organized a boycott; organized protests; they organized that communities would not shop there; that suppliers would not deliver there. Basically they threatened the very viability of the company.

In the end, the governors of two states, Massachusetts and New Hampshire got involved in the negotiations for the future of the company. And what do you think happened? The ousted CEO bought the remaining shares of the company from his cousin’s side of the family, got his old job back, and the fired employees were reinstated. The employees were able, through sheer force of will, and community, and coalition building, to turn around a situation that seemed to be looking at pretty significant odds.

As public policy students, you need to understand the importance of creating coalitions to achieve results. Bringing opposing sides to a consensus is not easy. In fact, I know it’s very, very hard. But it is my hope that dedicated people, such as yourselves, can create an alternative path to the gridlock that is so prevalent in Washington these days.

I want to encourage you students to think big and to think about how to create coalitions to solve problems as you go through your internships and get your first jobs. Have faith that you can make a difference.

I mentioned that I had spent a number of years working for the Salt Lake Olympic Committee. It was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. There’s something about an immovable deadline that really focuses you. You think about the opening ceremony the day you get hired and you also know the day you’ll get fired. It was a wonderful experience for me, but we had a lot of things that were thrown at us. We had 9-11, which occurred a few months before our opening ceremony.  We had to figure out whether a small state like Utah could host something as big as the Olympic Games. But in the Olympic Museum in Salt Lake City, is a display that celebrates the success of Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games. I think most people would say they were probably the most successful Winter Games that were ever held. And from my standpoint, it was certainly one of the best teams that I have ever worked with. In that museum there is a display that is made up of quotes that kind of summarize the effort that what we as the organizing committee found inspiring. And there’s one that I take with me each and every day as I think about some of the challenges that we have to face. It’s a quote by someone named Patrick Overton. And it’s really all about how do you deal with uncertainty, and how do you deal with challenges that you don’t know how you’re going to get past.

What Patrick Overton said is, “When you walk to the edge of all the light you have, and take the first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen: There will be something solid for you to stand upon, or you will be taught to fly.”

So as this new school of public policy takes wing, I have no doubt you are going to be ready to address the challenges that our nation faces. We need you. Good luck.