During Wednesday’s House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) questioned Acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau about FAA modernization.
00:00Thank you very much. As I said, your full written testimony will be included into the record,
00:05and we will now begin a period of questions and answers. We will again enforce a five-minute rule
00:11here so members are advised to get as quickly to your questions as you possibly can so that you
00:19can maximize the amount of time we have available. I'm going to recognize myself for five minutes.
00:25The House and Senate provided about $3.6 billion in our FY25 bills. They never got across the finish
00:35line, so the CR that we're currently under froze this level at $3.2 billion. I think another reason
00:45why we should not be living on continuing resolutions. We lose ground. I have a question
00:52about sustainability versus modernization, and unfortunately, you can't do one exclusively.
01:07Secretary Duffy's outlined his plans for modernization, but you still have to operate a system that you
01:14currently have. How does that work, and how difficult will it be for us to achieve the overall
01:22goals of modernization while at the same time providing the sustainable safety systems that
01:30we currently have in place, and how the FAA is best equipped to do that?
01:36Secretary Duffy Thank you, sir, for the question. Our budget request, in fact, incorporates the needs
01:45to continue to sustain what we have in place today, but clearly we've seen evidence where the equipment
01:54today is, as I stated in my testimony, starting to degrade in our ability to operate the system,
02:04and we see outages and delays associated with that equipment.
02:08I'm confident in our ability to maintain the system. In fact, I would just share with you all
02:13that we had a record-breaking Memorial Day weekend with respect to our ability to manage safely the
02:19operations in the national airspace system, and at the same time, it is imperative that we invest in
02:25the future of our air traffic system. We're spending over 90 percent of our funding right now just on
02:33maintaining, sometimes band-aiding, some of the equipment that we have, and so the Secretary's
02:38bold vision under, obviously, the President's direction is to make sure that we're able to
02:46build a new air traffic system to put in place to manage what we're dealing with today and the
02:51increase in traffic safely, and at the same time, anticipate the needs we need going forward as we
02:57think about things like drone integration, advanced thermobility, and the like, and so the budget that
03:03we're proposing today, in fact, sustains the operations that we have, and at the same time,
03:10enables our success in the future as we think about the new systems that we need to come online.
03:15So you mentioned the four billion dollars that's in the request for facilities and equipment.
03:19How much of that is strictly sustainability versus how much of that is actually going to go toward
03:28the overall cost associated with full modernization? So under, and you referenced earlier the project
03:35lift, one billion dollars of our request is going to go directly to advancing in an expedited fashion
03:42that transition from what we call copper wire or TDM to an internet-based, an IP or fiber optic
03:49transition. That will enable the resiliency, the efficiency of the system, and the ability to make
03:56sure that as we increase operations that we'll be able to do that in a consistent manner without the
04:01outages and the struggles that we've been facing as we've seen in the news just recently. Given your time
04:07at the FAA, going all the way back to nearly the turn of the millennium, when we started this NextGen
04:15project, and we've spent billions of dollars on NextGen, how would you grade, and you heard in my
04:21testimony or in my opening remarks about the fact that we got bogged down and the speed of technology
04:28was not matching the speed of our ability to improve, how would you grade, if you were giving a letter
04:36grade to the NextGen project, how would you grade it, and how much of that 14 billion dollars that we
04:44spent on NextGen was, could have been better spent, put it that way? I would certainly agree with the,
04:53with that premise that it could have been better spent. As I think about the advancements, and today
04:59we do have systems in place that NextGen generated with respect to things like Datacom, which is texting
05:05between the pilots, the controllers and the pilots. So some of those capabilities on, came online. At the same time,
05:11let's recognize that for a variety of reasons, that was not, that vision was not fully realized, which is why I, I pivot to what we're
05:21trying to do now with this new and bold plan. When we think about the future, when we think about what we're sustaining today, and where we need to go with respect to new technologies,
05:31safety technologies, and efficiency technologies, this is what we're looking for as we think about this new air traffic modernization plan.
05:39You didn't give it a letter grade, but can I assume that you're not advocating that it be on the honor roll?
