A brazen attack on air safety is underway — here’s what’s at stake

At the end of July, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) convened a three-day public hearing to investigate January’s mid-air collision over Washington, DC that killed 67 people. After the hearing, two conclusions were inescapable.

First, the disaster should have been prevented by existing safety rules. And second, the government regulators responsible for air safety have become hesitant to enforce those rules, especially when it means standing up to industry demands for more flights and lower costs.

Instead of fixing the regulatory state’s institutional cowardice, however, the Trump administration is moving to undermine it even further. The crisis in aviation safety has finally come to a head at precisely the moment when the wrong people are in charge of it.

There’s an old truism in aviation: regulations are written in blood. And there used to be quite a lot of it. Between 1960 and 1990, more than a thousand people died worldwide in commercial aviation accidents every year, even though flight volumes were less than a tenth of what they are today. Pilots flew too much. Cabin safety was ignored. Airplane manufacturers didn’t know basic materials science. Innocent passengers paid the price.

Since then, new safety standards and a culture of continuous improvement have reduced the fatal accident rate by 90 percent. Seat belt rules kept people from getting sucked out of Alaska Airlines 1282 when a section of the fuselage blew out in mid-air last year. Well-trained flight attendants evacuated passengers from actively burning airplanes twice this year without a single fatality (despite the fact that in both cases, some passengers stopped to retrieve their hand luggage). And pilots have averted multiple collisions in the air and on the ground since January 1st.

Success in safety lacks spectacle: it depends less on personal heroism than it does on following the rules. But it works.

When the rules get ignored, however, disaster follows. The NTSB investigation into the crash above Reagan National found a litany of problems that no one bothered to fix. Essential safety equipment didn’t work. Pilots were unclear about proper procedure. Air traffic control was understaffed and overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of traffic. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allowed helicopter traffic to pass directly below landing airplanes at Reagan National, even though this traffic scheme resulted in thousands of close calls every year. Excuses were plenty, and solutions few.

“Sixty-seven people are dead,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy shouted during the hearings. “Fix it. Do better.”

Her words perfectly encapsulate the state of aviation safety today. There are plenty of critics, but few problem-solvers. And being one would require the courage to oppose the post-Reaganite virtues of shareholder value and corporate freedom.

Take the new head of the FAA, Bryan Bedford, the former CEO of Frontier Airlines and Republic Airways (and a onetime reality TV star like his new boss Sean Duffy, and his boss Donald Trump). In spite of falling public confidence in aviation, he’s already initiated an RFK Jr.-style attack on foundational safety regulations just to make airlines more profitable.

During his confirmation, Bedford signaled that he was open to repealing two specific rules. The first requires airline pilots to accumulate 1,500 flight-hours of experience before they can earn their Air Transport Pilot (ATP) license. It was passed following the crash of Colgan Air 3407 in 2009, which was attributed to pilot error due to insufficient training. The second is the mandatory retirement age of 65 for pilots. This was set in 2007 to match international safety standards.

Under the guise of “just asking questions,” he called the standards “arbitrary” and unsupported by data. He also said that they contributed to pilot shortages, a claim he has repeated for almost a decade.

He’s wrong on the merits: multiple studies by academics and regulators have affirmed that the “protective effect of flight experience” increases with time, and that the majority of accidents occur before pilots reach 1,100 flight-hours of experience. Conversely, pilot performance starts to measurably degrade beyond age 63, and pilots above age 65 are at higher risk of “incapacitating events” that make an accident 10,000 times more likely.

But he’s less concerned about the facts than he is about disrupting the labor market in ways he never could as a corporate CEO.

Under Bedford, Republic was notorious for its “highly inferior” pay structure. In 2016, a year in which the FAA licensed a record number of new airline pilots, Republic had so much trouble recruiting and retaining pilots that it declared bankruptcy. In a competitive market, Bedford’s strategy didn’t work.

But as FAA Administrator, Bedford can bend the market to his will. Removing the hours requirement would flood the market with new pilots who would earn entry-level wages. Paradoxically, raising the retirement age would create artificially cheap labor, too. Because other countries still have mandatory age limits, pilots over 65 would not be able to fly international routes. Instead, they could only accept low-paying domestic routes on smaller airplanes. Both moves would effectively create industry-wide wage cuts via regulation — a favorite trick of the Trump administration.

Unsurprisingly, pilots themselves are overwhelmingly against both proposals. Less than five percent of pilots support raising the age limit past 65, or removing it altogether. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot of the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight, blasted Bedford for his stance on the 1,500 hour rule for its impact on safety.

“The nomination of Bryan Bedford for FAA Administrator puts the integrity of our aviation safety system at extreme risk,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “Bedford has indicated that he would reduce regulations and let the airlines regulate themselves. That’s insane.”

Despite these objections, Bedford was confirmed by a 53-43 vote. This was the narrowest margin for any FAA Administrator in history; most Administrators, including his immediate predecessor Michael Whitaker, have been confirmed unanimously.

Airlines have taken his divisive appointment as a signal that “minimum” safety regulations can now be minimized even more.

This June, American Airlines received approval to lower its flight attendant staffing levels on some of its new 787-9 airplanes. Typically, US-based airlines assign enough flight attendants so that each one can cover a single emergency exit in case of an evacuation. In this reduced scheme, a single flight attendant would be responsible for both emergency exits at the back of Economy class — a section of the airplane that seats up to 124 passengers.

Sara Nelson, who represents 55,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said that staffing guidelines were set half a century ago and haven’t been touched since then.

“We’ve got a regulatory agency that hasn’t kept up with the realities of the cabin,” she told The Verge. “Seats closer together, more people on the plane than ever before, more complications in the cabin.”

Flight attendants must also perform a wide variety of emergency duties, from using defibrillators to monitoring for possible security threats. As aviation’s first responders, they are stretched to capacity as-is. Reducing their levels below the minimum will make it nearly impossible to do their jobs.

Ultimately, Nelson’s concern isn’t just about a single airplane type. It’s about the precedent it sets. Historically, as soon as one major airline reduces staffing, Wall Street demands that the others quickly follow suit in order to reduce costs. If the whole industry follows American’s lead, it will be the clearest signal yet that those in power care more about fatter profit margins than they do about passenger safety.

To be clear, a regulatory rollback probably won’t cause significantly more airplanes to fall out of the sky. But it will create real risks.

Those risks might look like Aeroflot 1492 in 2019, where a slower-than-expected evacuation led to 41 fatalities. Or they might look like the disorganized and delayed reaction to the Air India 171 crash from India’s severely understaffed aviation regulator, which allowed misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread. Or they might look like higher burnout rates among pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers who must substitute individual effort for the hollowed-out institutions that no longer support them.

In short, the attack on regulations will reduce the margin of safety everywhere, and erode trust in air travel — all for the sake of letting the industry pad its margins.

This willingness to abandon safety standards in the name of profits is wrong for aviation, says Nelson.

“It’s a continued pressure and downward spiral. It’s shocking, but not surprising.”