Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been at the helm of the nation’s transportation infrastructure — including its aviation system — during a tumultuous four years.
In 2021, his first year as secretary, the pandemic still had the travel industry in free fall, nearly shutting down airlines in the United States. Then, as air travel dramatically rebounded, airline policies, including cancellations and the perks included in a ticket, changed. Checked-bag fees rose. The golden age of ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit Airlines waned, with these airlines beginning to increasingly resemble legacy carriers in offering more expensive fares. Then operational meltdowns of popular carriers like Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines disrupted travel for millions of passengers for days, underscoring the fragility of the systems underpinning air travel. And this year saw the busiest days of air travel ever, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Yet passengers got new rights, with Mr. Buttigieg carving out a stance of aggressively holding the airlines accountable. At times he faced criticism from both political parties as well the carriers, but under his leadership, the D.O.T. proposed regulations targeting junk fees, ticket refunds, costs for families to sit together and the mishandling of wheelchairs. From 2021 to 2024, the federal agency also issued record penalties of more than $200 million against airlines for consumer violations, about triple the amount levied in the previous 24 years combined.
As Mr. Buttigieg leaves office, there are rules that haven’t gone into effect. And the next transportation secretary may decline to pursue ongoing investigations into frequent flier programs and Delta’s handling of the CrowdStrike outage.
In a recent conversation, Mr. Buttigieg discussed what he believes he has accomplished for airline passengers during his tenure, his experiences flying with his husband and their children, and what might be next.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
As transportation secretary, you were responsible for overseeing the nation’s airways, railroads, highways, pipelines and shipping infrastructure. How do you think you did?
I’ll leave it to others to grade my performance, but we’ve been able to deliver the most transformative set of infrastructure investments in my lifetime. One way of thinking about it is, if I were to visit one project that we funded every day for the rest of my life, I would not live long enough to see even half of them.
I’m equally proud of what we were able to do in terms of using our policy tools to make people better off: railroad workers, airline passengers, communities that we have acted to protect, using the authorities that we have, and I believe we’re leaving this department better than we found it, too. There’s a lot of really great people here who will be able to continue to meet this department’s mission long after this administration is over.
What were the major pain points you identified in air travel, and what was your approach to address them for passengers?
When we arrived, the big question wasn’t how to fine-tune the air travel experience. The big question was whether America’s airlines were all about to go out of business. So the first order of business was to make sure that the airline sector survived, and we did, with tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funding.
Then came the question of how to respond to the demand that was coming in, and the fact that people were returning to the skies in a big way the next year, a trend that has continued. And we were getting a lot of complaints, so we got to work.
We knew that this department had tools to make passengers better off. We implemented rules, we supported legislation. We used transparency tools like the online dashboard and everything else at our disposal to improve things for passengers.
I think we’re justified in describing our work as the largest expansion of airline passenger rights since this department came into being.
One major area you targeted was refunds. How do you think refund requirements help address other passenger problems in aviation, like bumping and overselling?
Here’s an example. One thing that is unlawful for airlines to do is unrealistic scheduling, or scheduling routes that they know they can’t actually serve well. Even though they’re not allowed to do that, it’s difficult to enforce because it’s hard to prove.
One way to make sure that happens less frequently is to escalate the economic penalty for doing so, whether you catch them in a violation or not, and so a healthy side effect of the automatic refunds is that an airline now knows that if they fail to have a flight take off, virtually all of the passengers are going to get their money back. Before, they might have assumed that only portion of passengers would actually successfully go to the trouble of getting the refund. So I think that leads to more realistic schedules and smoother flight operations.
Delta’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, recently called the past four years “an overreach.” What’s your response?
I think anyone who says that the last few years are an overreach is out of touch with his customers, because the public response to this work has been overwhelmingly positive. I would add it’s been perfectly consistent with good business outcomes at an airline like Delta, which is plenty profitable, even as we require them to take better care of passengers.
We want airlines to succeed. We just want them to succeed by doing the right thing, and if they won’t do that on their own, we will implement policies to require it. I would not assume that a change in party will change the approach, because it’s not like only Democrats are telling us they love these airline refund rules.
Will the protections you’ve been able to push through last? How easy is it for these to be rolled back by the incoming administration?
Our increased enforcement practice was one of adding one or two zeros to the typical fines, so that it was enough to change airline behavior. I think any change to that would need to come with some kind of justification, and any change to a rule has to go through a process, just like we had to go through long, elaborate processes to get rules finalized.
And some important accomplishments are now encoded in law. The refund rule is reinforced by the F.A.A. reauthorization, which means that it would take an act of Congress to strip those passenger protections away. Without trying to predict the future, I’m skeptical that a Congress in either party would be eager to strip passenger protections away.
In what ways did flying with your own young children open your eyes to the gaps in protections for parents?
Hugely. Chasten, my husband, and I are still juggling with the gear, the stroller and the car seats, just like everybody else. It was part of why we were motivated to do our part to make it a little easier with things like the fee-free family seating, and some of the information we put up on our website about how the different airlines handle flying with kids.
You shouldn’t have to have frequent flier status to sit next to your kids.
The Transportation Department recently fined American Airlines a record amount for its treatment of passengers who use wheelchairs. How optimistic are you that we will see tangible and lasting change here, across airlines?
I’ve heard a lot from advocates, stakeholders and friends about how important this is — that when an airline mangles your wheelchair, it ruins not only your trip, but often your everyday life. And replacing a wheelchair can sometimes take a very long time, and it can even be a life-or-death matter, given what has happened sometimes with the mishandling of wheelchairs and of passengers themselves.
The point of these fines is to make sure that they are less necessary in the future.
What are some pressing issues with air travel that still need to be addressed?
There are all the projects that we funded that are still underway or yet to enter construction. There’s about 1,500 airports that we’re improving, and a long-haul modernization of the F.A.A. that is underway.
Really what I’m hoping we’ve achieved, and what the next few years will hopefully prove, is a change in the practice and culture of how airlines treat passengers. I think that should be something that will last, but will require constant tending.
How many states and cities did you visit while in this role? How did you fly?
All 50 states and 199 cities in the United States, and then nine countries: Canada, Mexico, Ukraine, Poland, Japan, Scotland/U.K., Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
And I flew mostly commercially and in economy. As an airline regulator, I think it’s important to eat where you cook.
As a frequent flier, what’s your best travel advice?
Don’t check a bag if you can help it. Always have a backup plan in the back of your head.
Remember to be a human when you’re engaging with flight attendants and airport workers and fellow passengers. Just remember you’re all going to the same place. One thing that always strikes me as funny is how, when it’s time to board, everybody can’t wait, as if the cabin was the sweetest place on earth. And then upon arrival, everybody can’t wait to get off, as if the cabin were on fire. I’m not in any hurry to get off the plane and stand on the cold jet bridge.
I also think it’s important to really take just a second to contemplate the magic of the fact that we get to where we’re going by being propelled through the air, and that we get to see the clouds from the other side.
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