U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao Announces $779 Million in Funding for Airport Infrastructure

ADS-B Rebates Have All Been Reserved

FAA Announces Safety Rating for Costa Rica

FAA General Aviation ADS-B Rebates Running Out

Fly Safe: Prevent Loss of Control Accidents

FAA Statement on UAS Detection Systems at Airports

Rising to Meet the Challenge

Remarks as Delivered

Good morning, Paul, and thanks for that kind introduction. It’s good to be here in Asheville—although I suppose it’s good to be anywhere that’s not D.C.

I joke about that, but it’s actually true, and not just because D.C. is a fishbowl. It’s good to get outside the beltway because it’s important to meet with the folks on the front lines. I’ve always believed that safety is not the product of a PowerPoint or a report. Safety is what happens when the people in the field—all of us together—make it the basis for what we say and do, how we act.  

Normally I wouldn’t do this, but here’s today’s takeaway…which will come as no surprise to many of you:  safety is a shared responsibility. Each one of us has a role. It’s not only the pilot or the mechanic or the inspector—it’s all of us. If we’re not pulling in the same direction, safety is at a standstill. And there’s little disagreement amongst all of us: safety has got to be at the top of the list, the top priority in everything we do.  

The recent groundings of the 737 and the Cirrus have brought safety to the forefront. As I speak to you today, the Boeing 737 Max remains grounded as the investigations continue.  

But we are still left with an unspeakable tragedy, and with it, a push to do something. As is often the case with human suffering, there’s a real pull to take immediate action. But as we know, that’s not always the best way to address the actual cause of the problem. With respect to the 737 Max, the FAA waited until we had data that linked the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines accidents before we grounded the U.S. fleet. And when we had the data, we acted within a few hours.

The facts are these:  It took five years to certify the 737 Max.  Boeing applied for certification in January 2012. The certification was completed in March 2017. During those five years, FAA safety engineers and test pilots put in 110,000 hours of work, and they flew or supported 297 test flights.

That said, the 737 Max won’t fly in the U.S. again until our safety analysis says it’s safe to do so.

Turning to the Cirrus 50, when we issued the emergency Airworthiness Directive, it was prompted by reports of a systemic problem with AOA sensors. Accidents didn’t trigger the decision to ground the Cirrus 50, data did — that’s how the system is supposed to work. Cirrus has developed an FAA-approved corrective action. It also revised emergency procedures in the flight manual.  

These aren’t the same AOA sensors used on the 737, and the situations are unrelated, but I note that this isn’t about taking action, it’s about taking correct action at the appropriate time. We have one agenda and one agenda only: safety.  

I joked before about getting out of D.C. to see what’s happening in the field. At the FAA, I get to see quite a bit of the National Airspace System — like general aviation operations.

General aviation aircraft comprise a majority of the U.S. civil aviation fleet. And as important as the commercial and military sectors are, the GA community also performs a variety of critical functions. Personal transportation, flight instruction, law enforcement, agricultural operations, humanitarian relief…the list is extensive. It’s an impressive resume, and the data tell us GA safety is on the upswing. Working with the GA community, we set the goal of reducing the fatal accident rate to no more than 1.0 fatal accident per 100,000 flight hours by FY 2018.  

When we need somebody to step up, GA always does. The preliminary data show we—you—exceeded that goal. The actual FY 2018 result may be closer 0.84.  

I know the Insurance industry knows this fact quite well, so I know you recognize that’s a huge success. To accomplish our safety improvement goals, the FAA and industry work collaboratively through the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee—the GAJSC.  

The GAJSC will analyze data from accidents and incidents to identify risks and develop safety enhancements to mitigate those risks. The GAJSC was formed in the likeness of the CAST. As most of you would no doubt surmise, the GAJSC identified loss of control in-flight as the leading cause in fatal GA accidents.  

The group has also analyzed and developed mitigations for non-fuel related engine failures. The GAJSC will soon finish its Controlled Flight into Terrain analysis. There’s actually good news here: CFIT accidents have declined. You’ll hear a lot more from Pete about technology driven innovations in cockpit displays in a moment, but they have played a vital role helping to reduce CFIT. The team is evaluating additional steps we can take to further reduce this risk because we all know CFIT events have a low survivability rate.

The GAJSC partnership works. It really works. Since 2012, the GAJSC’s three working groups have identified root causes associated with both loss of control and engine failure accidents. From this work, 40 safety enhancements have been adopted, aimed at addressing these causal factors. Another 10 CFIT related safety enhancements will begin to be decided on by the GAJSC this month.  

I’d like to give credit where credit’s due. The insurance community has had representatives on the GAJSC, the Safety Analysis Team of the GAJSC and its working groups. I’m hoping that Jim Anderson, the senior VP at Starr Aviation, is here. Are you here, Jim?  Thanks for serving as a representative.  

GA’s involvement goes well beyond the GAJSC. This audience is no stranger to the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing program—ASIAS.  The ASIAS team consists of aviation industry and the FAA working together to collect and analyze data, actively searching for systemic risks.  

The ASIAS team includes 88 business/corporate members. There are 12 flight training universities and institutions as well as additional light GA operators who participate in ASIAS. These groups have contributed more than 1 million flight hours of digital flight data to ASIAS.  

That’s what partnership does. I truly believe that data sharing is the way forward to advance safety. You are all off to a very good start. We need to build on your success by expanding participation.  

You’ve been right there with the commercial and military sectors in helping us to put a safety culture in place.  he safety culture has literally transformed what this audience would have labeled “uninsurable” and made it insurable. The safety culture has a ripple effect—through aviation, through society.  Safety spurs efficiency—and efficiency bolsters the bottom line.  

It stands to reason: what’s more efficient is more profitable, more affordable. And with affordability comes the potential for expansion: more aircraft, more routes, more destinations. That strengthens the economy. Safety is the domino that sets a lot of things in motion, and they’re all the right things. That’s why safety needs to be the first step.

As you know, the safety culture demands that safety be infused into all of our processes from top to bottom—in a continuous loop. When you think about where aviation has gone in a little more than a century, it’s hard to argue the point. We’ve gone from barnstorming to a safety record that is the envy of all modes of transportation. The automotive industry has asked us for insights.  

Even the energy and health care industries have come to us to ask the question, “How did you achieve this level of safety?” I’ll tell you this much:  we didn’t do it alone. I think the answer is that government doesn’t have all the answers. That’s what the Part 23 rewrite was all about. We set the desired performance standard…we, the regulators, ensure the standard is met and kept. But we leave the business of how that standard is met (and, quite often, exceeded), up to the operators, manufacturers, and maintainers. We removed the prescriptive requirements that had been at the heart of Part 23—and we replaced them with end-state criteria.  

My colleague Dr. Mike Romanowski will talk about part 23 in more depth after me, but, for far too long, aviation moseyed along with very little change in basic design. But thanks to the innovators that are among us, that changed, and it changed for the better. The question for FAA quickly became, “How can we keep up with this and maintain safety?”

Performance based regulations are the answer.

And I think we’d be naive not to consider that performance-based safety regulations are capable of leading to safety levels beyond what FAA requires. The onus is on the manufacturer to demonstrate compliance with FAA design standards.  The manufacturer does the testing and collects the data.

This is the heart of performance-based regulation. The company decides how to comply with the performance standards. The government does not enter the picture with a specific fix in mind. And because of that, there’s always the possibility that the designer’s performance solution raises the bar even higher than what Uncle Sam had in mind. By exceeding government requirements, the performance based regulations might very well be changing how we consider risk in the aviation industry itself.  

I’d like to come full circle now in a way that you’re probably not expecting. None of this will matter much if we don’t have workforce in place to make it happen. This isn’t complex science:  how do we attract new talent? How do we make sure we select the right people for the job? Those questions are by no means new, and they’re certainly not exclusive to our industry.

The numbers tell quite a story. Four decades after deregulation, we’re closing in on a billion passengers, domestic and international. IATA says that passengers will double by 2036. One forecast says we will need 117,000 more pilots—in North America alone. It’s also said we’ll need three-quarters of a million new technicians over the next 20 years.  

At the same time, the number of private pilots holding active airmen certificates has decreased by about a third in the last decade.  Looking through the same lens, commercial pilots decreased 21 percent.  The military isn’t the source it used to be, because it doesn’t turn out as many pilots as it used to.  College programs don’t have enough instructors—because they’re taking jobs with the airlines.  The scenario for mechanics and technicians is no better.  

The suggestions about how to solve this run the gamut. There were recommendations to increase pay and improve working conditions to attract more people to the profession. Other experts suggest subsidizing and overseeing pilot training in ab initio programs.  

For its part, industry is addressing funding options and improvements to make loans more accessible for pilot training. And a number of carriers are actively engaging their local communities so that the next generation is aware of and interested in aviation as a profession.  

At the FAA, overcoming this challenge and bringing new, well trained, people into the aviation system is a high priority for me.  We are working internally to double down on our STEM outreach efforts. We’re increasing our partnerships with industry, academia and other government agencies.  

We must ensure that we are able to fill critical aviation jobs in the future with people who have the right skills to keep our system operating at the highest levels of safety.  

Wherever you stand on this, one thing is for sure. Unless and until each one of us takes an active and personal stand on getting kids interested in STEM, we will find the pipeline can and will run dry. We’re in a battle with Silicon Valley for talent, and we’re losing.  Smart kids aren’t sitting around waiting for us to intrigue them.  

This is not the time for this industry to sit on its hands. This is a time—the time—for each of us to engage kids and schools at all levels. Start with primary grades. That’s where it started with me. Success or failure sits squarely on our own shoulders. We need to make the workforce of tomorrow a priority, and we need to do it today.  

Thank you.

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FAA Accepting Applications From Experienced Controllers

China Civil Aviation Development Forum

Thank you, for the warm welcome from the Civil Aviation Administration of China and for the opportunity to join you at this impressive event. It is an honor to be here in Beijing representing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

As we gather here this week, we find both of our countries — and all countries for that matter — on the edge of a bold new era of innovation, one that will require even closer collaboration among us as new entrants shatter old norms with their game changing technologies. I know that we have a partner in that journey with CAAC. You share a similar safety philosophy and our bilateral cooperation helps amplify our safety messages.

Let’s reflect for a moment on the FAA/CAAC partnership over the past 40 years and on how far we’ve come since the United States and China resumed diplomatic relations in 1979. Our work supported the restart of commercial air service in January 1981. The first was CAAC Flight 981, a Boeing 747SP that flew from Beijing to San Francisco.

Think about this – starting with Flight 981 in 1981, there were on average about two daily flights between mainland China and the United States. Based on the latest data from the International Air Transport Association, there are now 100 daily flights. 

That stellar growth in flight activity is also matched by what our two countries have done in practically all other aspects of aviation, including operations, aircraft certification, air traffic management, and always most importantly, aviation safety. We thank you for being our partner in this journey and look forward to the next 40 years. One thing is for sure, aviation will look much different by that time, but our bedrock principles on safety will not. 

So how do we and the world’s aviation regulators introduce these new and radically different users into the safest form of transportation on the planet? How do we do it wisely, safely, efficiently and in a reasonable timeframe?

In thinking about the challenges, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my sons on a stormy evening long ago.  

It was a sticky August night in Washington DC (we sometimes get those in Washington…) and a raging thunderstorm had knocked the electrical power out. I took the boys out to our screened-in porch to watch the driving rain, the wind and the lightning show.  My adventurous 12-year old pleaded, “Hey Dad, can I go out and play in this?” My younger son was sitting very quietly in my lap for the longest time. I finally asked him what he thought about the storm. He says, “Dad, is this any way for a seven-year-old to die?” That’s reality–two boys, from the same genetic stock, having two polar opposite views of the same phenomena they were observing. 

Their divergent views of the world is a perfect analogy for the challenge we in the aerospace industry face with the rapid development of a new technologies that enable increasingly autonomous operations. Some see an incredible opportunity for development and new markets and services. Others see this as potentially undermining safety and adding new levels of risk into the system. As a regulator, our job is to find the pathway forward. 

One area where we’re having to find that way- and quickly- is in unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS, and urban air mobility vehicles, also known as flying taxis. 

As of last month, the FAA had registered almost 1.4 million UAS, nearly 400,000 of which were for commercial operations. That’s four times as many registered drones than there are manned aircraft, and we’ve been registering drones for less than four years. We already issued about 130,000 remote pilot licenses. A good many of these are small, semi-autonomous systems that you fly with your finger and a smart phone, the type made so popular by China-based DJI, now the world’s largest manufacturer of civilian drones.

Flying taxis are no longer in the realm of fantasy – they’re coming very, very soon, and all of us here will have to start thinking about whether we’ll jump into one to slip the surly bonds of traffic. 

Ehang, based here in China, is a frontrunner in the emerging urban air mobility market, It was the first to carry passengers on test flights of its fully automated, two-seat, electrically powered flying taxi. Although not yet certified by the CAAC, Ehang is delivering vehicles for a variety of demonstrations here in China, in the United States, Canada and elsewhere. Other nascent air mobility companies like Uber Elevate and Kitty Hawk are also racing quickly to deploy these vehicles to the market. 

The Ehang operating concept is right out of a science fiction novel: A passenger boards the autonomous air vehicle.  He or she selects from a list of destinations on a touchscreen display and clicks a button to depart and another button to land. The vehicle flies the route autonomously but is under continuous surveillance and monitoring from a command and control center on the ground. And this is already happening in tests. 

Not hard to see what might make regulators nervous. Certifying the safety of a vehicle that carries passengers yet has no pilot on board; Figuring out how to integrate its operations with traditional air traffic; and regulating numerous fleets of these vehicles. 

Let’s face it — these are big challenges compared to the manned aircraft we’ve managed very successfully for decades–not just in terms of use but in terms of product cycles can generally be measured in months, not years. 

So let me touch on how we’re charting a course toward integration of these new entrants — gathering the data, creating the framework, and building the infrastructure, and doing it all safely.

Our risk management approach, how we set regulations, the policies we promote — and most importantly — how we’ve gotten to the level of safety in traditional aviation is all about having access to data to properly understand and manage risk.  That is why the UAS Integration Pilot Program or IPP that Derek Kan talked about this morning is so important.

The IPP is allowing us to work with a variety of users and government organizations to safely test and validate advanced operations of drones. This will help us gain the data to develop the UAS regulations, policy and guidance through practical applications.   And as he noted, it has allowed us to grant the first air carrier certification to Alphabet Inc’s Wing Aviation for package deliveries in rural Blacksburg, Virginia.  We anticipate several other companies will gain this approval over the next few months. 

The FAA is focused on enabling an ever-expanding universe of UAS operations.  In order to allow for such operations to be conducted safely and securely, we’ve moved forward with a number of rulemakings for small UAS, including external markings, flights over people and at night, and safe and secure operational concepts and will soon be issuing a rule on remote ID.  Together, these rules will form our framework for advancing this new industry. 

We won’t just need regulatory framework, we will need an air traffic management system capable of managing manned and unmanned vehicles, where many of the latter will be highly autonomous.  As Derek Kan noted this morning we are working closely with NASA and industry to develop the concepts and tools we’ll need to accomplish this task.  What we learn from these increasingly complex demonstrations in higher-density urban areas will help inform the requirements for providers of these services going forward. 

How fast can we bring new innovations and technology into service? In commercial aviation, no new technology historically has premiered before its time where we have confidence it can be safely integrated in our airspace. And while I’ve been speaking of the future- we can’t forget the need to address the present challenges.

We’ve had two tragedies in the last year with the Boeing 737 MAX- and I want to extend the FAA’s heartfelt sympathy to the friends and families of those two accidents. Aviation is something that has broken down borders and opened opportunity across the world.  But it also means that we all share the sadness of each other’s losses. 

We continue to review any and all evidence from the ongoing accident investigations. We became an international leader in aviation by taking action based on data and addressing risk. And we’d be the first to admit that we have not always gotten it perfect.  That is why we are relentless advocates for transparency and continuous improvement.  In fact, it’s one of the reasons we have invited Director’s General from around the world to Dallas this month to provide a comprehensive overview of the steps that have been taken since the accidents. And let me be clear- the only timeline FAA has in returning the 737 MAX to service is simple- when we are confident that the issues arising from these accidents have been addressed and it is safe to operate.

When we look to the future, and the new users and new technologies coming into aviation- it’s a certainty that there will be differing opinions on whether any particularly technology or innovation will help or hurt – just like my sons’ impression of the lightning storm that night. 

The innovations are not going to slow down. That is a challenge for the FAA and other civil aviation regulators around the world.  The FAA is committed to finding a way forward that protects the public but allows innovation and opportunity to move forward, and we’ll work hand-in-hand with our international partners, including CAAC, to make sure we address together these constantly changing challenges and to learn from one another. 

Thank you so much for your kind attention.