FAA faces a leadership vacuum

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Quick Fix

— FAA acting Administrator Billy Nolen will leave his role as soon as this summer, creating an even bigger void at the top of the agency.

— The Justice Department joined DOT’s investigation of Southwest Airlines’ holiday meltdown.

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he favors the Senate’s bipartisan rail safety bill over the House version, which doesn’t go as far to crack down on freight rail.

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“I woke up this morning / To find that we have outlived the myth of trust / You woke up this morning / To the fact we’ve lost the things / We took for granted between us.”

Driving the Day

NOLEN TO LEAVE FAA: FAA acting Administrator Billy Nolen will vacate his post as soon as this summer, Alex reports, leaving behind an even bigger void at the top of an agency that’s already been without a Senate-confirmed leader for over a year.

“I have given everything to this agency, and now it’s time to do the same for my family, who have sacrificed so much and supported me during my time at the FAA,” Nolen wrote in an internal memo.

— His departure comes at an especially fraught moment for the aviation system, which has seen a recent uptick in runway near-collisions and is projected to bear a resurgence in air travel to pre-pandemic levels. Nolen, who first joined the FAA in January 2022, noted in the memo that he would leave his post when a new FAA administrator is nominated “this summer,” though Alex reports that he’s expected to leave then no matter where the confirmation process for his successor stands at that point.

— The White House has struggled to find a permanent leader for the FAA. Alex learned that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg asked Nolen to stay on longer after Phil Washington, the Biden administration’s nominee for the top job, withdrew his candidacy, but Nolen said he wasn’t interested in the permanent role — though there was no shortage of those in the aviation industry and on the Hill who saw him as the logical candidate for the permanent job.

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At the Agencies

PROBE EXPANDS: DOT on Friday said that the Justice Department is now a part of the investigation into Southwest Airlines’ holiday season meltdown, Alex reports, an expansion of DOT efforts to see whether Southwest scheduled flights it knew it couldn’t properly staff in violation of federal law. DOT spokesperson Kerry Arndt said the focus remains on Southwest’s scheduling practices. The airline canceled more than 16,000 flights from late December to early January and stranded passengers for days as other airlines were able to quickly recover from a major winter storm.

“The DOT team probing whether Southwest engaged in unrealistic scheduling of flights is also closely coordinating with DOJ and FAA,” Arndt said in a statement to POLITICO. “DOT will leverage the full extent of its investigative and enforcement power to ensure consumers are protected and to hold Southwest accountable for any violations of the law.”

On the Hill

SENATE > HOUSE: Buttigieg said he prefers the Senate’s version of rail safety legislation to the House’s and that waiting until the NTSB issues its final report on the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to pass legislation is the wrong approach. He said that some of the industry’s practices that in his opinion weaken safety “will continue unless Congress raises the bar.”

“That’s why we’re making the case here on Capitol Hill every chance that we have,” Buttigieg said. “I’m encouraged by the Senate bill that’s been proposed because it includes some but not all of the measures that I called for. And the House version seems to not be quite as fulsome as the Senate version, but many of those steps are positive, too.”

— The Senate’s rail safety bill, S. 576 (118), would mandate two-person crews on freight trains and is being led by Ohio Sens. J.D. Vance and Sherrod Brown. The House version of the bill, H.R. 1633 (118), which is also bipartisan, doesn’t include the two-person-crew requirement. While House Transportation Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) have suggested waiting until the NTSB investigation is complete to fashion legislation, Buttigieg wants action sooner.

“We may learn more a year from now with the NTSB report,” Buttigieg said. “But just to be clear, this is one of many incidents that the NTSB is evaluating in rail alone and there are more every year. So if we’re waiting until there’s the final last word ever, we’d be waiting forever.”

Rail

NOT A DOLLAR MORE: All thirteen freight rail unions — in addition to the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO — launched a campaign on Friday demanding Class Is stop stock buybacks until the industry lowers the rate of safety incidents and ends Precision-Scheduled Railroading. The campaigns contrasted Class Is’ more than $165 billion in stock buybacks and soaring profits since 2015 — when freight railroads adopted PSR — with a worsening rate of derailments and safety incidents.

— “Any suggestion that railroads fail to invest appropriately, and that this in turn is related to a negative safety record, is categorically false,” a spokesperson for the Association of American Railroads said in a statement, noting that freight railroads’ capital spending on their networks has averaged $23.9 billion each year over the past 15 years, and that metrics including the hazmat incident rate are “at some of their lowest levels” in decades. “The industry will continue to allocate capital to further improve safety and meet demand,” the spokesperson said.

— Freight railroads’ billions in stock buybacks and wide operating margins have also come under scrutiny on the Hill and by DOT as lawmakers — including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Brown and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), among others — sought accountability from Norfolk Southern after the East Palestine derailment.

Aviation

ANTITRUST TRUMPING PARTY ID: Nancy Scola’s profile of Matt Stoller, an antitrust advocate with the American Economic Liberties Project, illustrates how the terminally online Stoller is warming up to conservatives (think folks like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who voted against the Biden administration’s intervention in last year’s freight rail labor dispute) and was won over by Buttigieg’s action to investigate the Spirit-JetBlue merger. “BOOM!!!!” Stoller tweeted after the probe’s announcement, which, in his eyes, made Buttigieg a Democrat with “the courage to learn,” even as the Transportation secretary represented one of Stoller’s frequent online targets.

— Stoller, an Elizabeth Warren acolyte who a White House official said “speaks Republican fluently,” is also interested in the bipartisan push from Vance and Brown to overhaul rail safety rules. And he attacked Jimmy Carter’s decision to deregulate the airlines on the day Carter entered hospice care, referring to Carter as “genuinely awful.” Journalist Anand Giridharadas summed up Stoller’s MO by saying that on a typical day on Twitter, “I agree with Matt, disagree with him, wish I had thought of something he said, regret something he said on his behalf, [and] retweet something he wrote.”

PRICIER AND PRICIER: 2022’s average domestic airfare — round-trips or one-ways purchased without a return ticket — rose 14 percent from 2021, at $378, or a 6 percent drop from 2019, according to recent data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Average ticket prices were even higher in the last quarter of 2022 at $394. At the same time, more people traveled on U.S. airlines last year, which saw roughly 318 million passengers in comparison to 2021’s 244 million. Airlines are projecting a continued surge in air travel as the industry bounces back from the pandemic.

Transportation

KEEP THE FUEL FLOWING: Florida Sens. Rubio and Rick Scott called on EPA Administrator Michael Regan to keep non-summertime fuels moving in Florida after historic flooding April 12 shuttered Port Everglades, a major fuel terminal, and left more than half of all gas stations in Miami and Fort Lauderdale without fuel early last week. Rubio and Scott urged Regan to approve a state request to allow deliveries of non-summertime fuels beyond the May 1 deadline in order to avoid “cascading price spikes at the pump and shortages of gasoline and other fuels, imposing additional inflationary pressures on Florida families and businesses, and harming Florida’s economy.”

TRANSIT WORKER SAFETY: The FTA proposed new requirements under its Public Transportation Agency Safety Plans regulation Friday in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking aimed at improving transit worker safety. The proposal includes updates for Agency Safety Plans, coordination with frontline transit workers, risk reduction programs addressing accidents, injuries and assaults on transit workers, de-escalation training for certain transit workers and more. The NPRM will go live in the Federal Register this week and maintain a 60-day comment period.

The Autobahn

— “Europe’s planes keep flying despite cyberattack.” The Wall Street Journal.

— “Help! Spirit Airlines left us behind in Guatemala City.” The New York Times.

— “American Airlines employee dies on tarmac at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.” The Dallas Morning News.

— “A cruise ship for Florida’s migrant crisis had nowhere to dock.” The New York Times.