New FAA administrator wants to modernize U.S. air traffic, ‘unleash drone dominance’
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford during an August press conference at the Department of Transportation building. Credit: AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
WASHINGTON, D.C. — With just seven weeks on the job, the new head of the Federal Aviation Administration is prioritizing modernizing aging infrastructure in the wake of the deadly collision over the Potomac River in January, and advancing efforts to unlock the potential of small commercial drones.
Bryan Bedford told an audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Aerospace Summit here on Tuesday that, as a 35-year veteran of the aviation industry with past leadership roles at Phoenix Airline Services and West Air Airlines, he is wary of initiatives that overpromise and disappoint. He cited the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, project begun in 2018, which aimed to modernize air traffic management and transition from a radar-based system to a satellite-based one, but has been criticized by government watchdogs for moving too slowly.
“The user community is a little jaundiced about whether this will be another NextGen as well, but I encourage you to think about the iteration cycle of innovation in aviation,” Bedford said. “The FAA paces itself essentially with Boeing and Airbus and Bombardier and Embraer. We’re innovating at about the same pace as aircraft manufacturers are redesigning. But the world is changing.”
He called the Jan. 29 collision of an American Airlines regional jet and U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that killed 67 a “wake-up call” and cited now-familiar complaints about the “antiquated” and “analog” national airspace system (NAS).
“The FAA has over 4,500 facilities across the country — 4,500 facilities that are connected by copper wire. Those 4,500 facilities need to be connected by fiber, or perhaps low-Earth orbit satellite,” Bedford said. “The fiber plan is going to require a lot of trenching, and trenching requires permitting. Permitting requires [National Environmental Policy Act] compliance. These are things that can, frankly, take years to accomplish. So we really do need help from Congress to help waive some of these difficulties that we foresee, bringing the NAS into a digital architecture.”
If FAA must reduce traffic capacity to prioritize safety, the Trump administration will do that, he said, but stressed that such a reduction would come at a high economic cost.
“When we invest in the NAS, something we haven’t done in over two decades, we increase the ability for the aviation industry to grow. And today we’re capped,” he said. The $12.5 billion allotted to FAA within President Donald Trump’s signature legislative package approved in July was “a great downpayment,” he said, toward meeting modernization goals.
At a later panel, Franklin McIntosh, acting chief operating officer of FAA’s Air Traffic Organization, highlighted another initiative to address FAA’s staffing shortages and technology deficits: automation tools to reduce workload.
“We’re talking about a fraction of the cost [of infrastructure changes] and months versus years,” McIntosh said.
Meanwhile, Bedford said he plans to embrace the White House’s directive to “unleash drone dominance” in U.S. airspace. The agency is preparing to release an anticipated proposal on partnering with companies developing eVTOLs, short for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and “doing test cases on that as well.”
FAA and the U.S. Department of Transportation in June announced a five-country alliance aimed at streamlining certification of these designs and other advanced air mobility aircraft, which have been proposed for use as flying taxis, medevac vehicles and package delivery transports, among other possibilities.
Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy “want to be good partners in developing innovation and aviation infrastructure and airspace design,” Bedford said, adding that “new opportunity cases” would be released within the next two weeks on advanced and urban air mobility platforms, as well as supersonic flight.
“All that being said, the demand on the NAS is growing exponentially, and we have to find a way to not only solve the problem, but help be partners in creating this aviation infrastructure of the future,” he said. “Redesigning the NAS, looking at precision approaches, thinking about airspace, not as an airport, perhaps an airspace region. These are concepts that, as we digitize and sort of bring the tools into the NAS, we’ll be able to think creatively about how we maximize our capacity across the country.”
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