United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said “this is the most optimistic I’ve been in my entire career about finally getting the FAA fixed” as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has called for increased investment amid major outages and delays at Newark Liberty International Airport.
“I and others in the aviation industry have been working on this for decades, and I think we’re finally– we’ve turned the corner, and we have the commitment,” Kirby said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
Air traffic control and aviation more broadly has been under the microscope in recent months, following January’s deadly midair collision over Washington, D.C., several close calls and the more recent outages. And on Sunday, there was another 45-minute ground stop due to another equipment outage.
On Friday, the second air traffic control outage in two weeks occurred at Newark Liberty International Airport, with air traffic controllers losing radar and the ability to communicate with some planes for up to 90 seconds in both instances. The second outage came as flight schedules were returning to normal following a series of delays and cancellations since the initial outage on April 28.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration announced plans Thursday to overhaul the air traffic control system by replacing the technology at sites across the country and building a number of new coordination centers. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the undertaking would cost “billions — lots of billions,” while deferring to Congress on the final number.
Kirby said in an interview with CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe of his optimism in the reforms to the Federal Aviation Administration that the commitment to overhauling the system is “across the board.”
“It’s bipartisan, it’s bicameral,” Kirby said. “Senate, House, administration, Secretary Duffy — across the board, a commitment to getting this fixed. We know how to do it.”
The issue isn’t new, with commitments to overhauling the FAA spanning back decades, and often enjoying bipartisan support. But Kirby said what he believes makes this time different is the funding, saying the administration will ask for all the money up front, which “lets you plan the entire project and get the entire project done.” And Kirby said the key players also make him optimistic, calling Duffy “action-oriented” and “committed to getting this done.”
In the meantime, Kirby stressed that safety is the entire aviation industry’s top priority, saying that “it absolutely is safe at Newark and in the entire country.”
Kirby outlined the extensive training and backup procedures within the industry, saying “we have backups to backups to backups to keep the sky safe” amid outages.
“What happens is the pilots look for alternative frequencies,” Kirby said. “They go to alternative centers with alternative radars, and they also have a system in the airplane where they can see its equivalent of radar, they can see their position in the air, in the sky, and all the other aircraft around them.”
The United Airlines CEO acknowledged that in the event of outages, the whole system is deliberately slowed down, which can be disruptive to customers, while it prioritizes safety. Kirby said United has proactively reduced the number of flights to create more space at the airport, while the FAA is working with other airlines to do the same.
“What happens when they’re short staffed or there’s a technology issue, they slow the airspace down,” Kirby said. “It leads to customer impacts. We have to delay or cancel flights because there are more flights scheduled than can arrive, but it keeps the system safe, and that’s absolutely what they should do.”
Kaia Hubbard is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
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