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Airlines Confidential Podcast
339 - Scott McCartney with FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford
01:02:55
Scott McCartney with FAA Administrator Bryan Bedf…
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- [00:04]
Brian Bedford
Airlines confidential with Scott McCartney is made possible with support from RTX, Collins Aerospace, Pratt and Whitney and Raytheon Connecting and protecting our world rtx.com/flight the leader in Cadet Academy flight training programs infinityflight.com Ontario International Airport in Southern California state SoCal so Easy flyontario.com the Executive MBA in Aviation at the University of Colorado, Denver business ucdenver.edu and by Cirium, the world's most trusted source of Aviation Analytics. Cirium.com we also welcome your business support.
- [00:51]
Scott McCartney
Contact us@airlinesconfidential.com welcome to Airlines Confidential.
- [00:59]
Podcast Host / Narrator
I'm Scott McCartney, hoping everyone had a safe and meaningful Memorial Day, a day when we remember our military veterans who died in service to their country. It is a solemn and meaningful holiday and let us keep those who gave the ultimate sacrifice in our thoughts. Memorial Day is also the unofficial start of the busy summer travel period, as we all know. Let's hope this past week isn't an indication of what's ahead this summer for frontline workers at airlines and airports and the travelers they are serving. I say that because storms disrupted travel across the country, not to mention a sinkhole in pavement near the end of Runway 422 at New York's LaGuardia Airport, down to one Runway instead of two for two full days. You can imagine the delays for people trying to get into or out of New York. I say that because storms disrupted travel across the country, not to mention a sinkhole in pavement near the end of Runway 422 at New York's LaGuardia Airport. Down to one Runway instead of two for two days. You can imagine the delays for people trying to get into or out of New York. Perhaps many of you did more than imagine and unfortunately experienced LaGuardia delays and cancellations. As always, pack your patience. I'm flying solo this week. Sort of. This podcast will feature a detailed and insightful and I do believe, encouraging interview that I had last week with FAA Administrator Brian Bedford. I think listeners are going to eat this up. Brian brings new details and explanations on recent decisions and future plans. I think the interview is enlightening on many fronts. We go through the three main pillars of our air traffic control system, airspace management, equipment modernization and controller staffing. We talk about how he's managing the faa, we talk about time and money and whether politics has played any role in recent decisions. I'll have more to say at the end of the podcast, but spoiler alert. I think it's an honest and detailed discussion and I came away excited about the future And I'm usually pretty pessimistic about the air traffic control future. I've covered air traffic control issues in the US and around the world for nearly three decades. And I've watched time and time again when big plans just don't come to fruition. I have to say, this past week I walked out of FAA headquarters in Washington as excited as I've ever been about the potential to really improve air service in this country. So stay tuned. First one news item that I think is worth reviewing before we get to Brian Bedford. Spirit Airlines of blessed memory reported its March financial results to the bankruptcy court. You'll recall that Spirit went out of business on May 2nd. This is the most recent report, maybe the last report we get, but the most recent report on Spirit's finances leading up to the shutdown. But March is eye popping. It's a surprise even though you know the end of the story because March was really terrible for Spirit. The company burned through nearly $240 million of cash in March. Spirit started the month with a cash balance of more than 781 million and and ended the month at 541 million. Of that 541 million, more than 422 million was restricted, meaning it couldn't be spent or it had to be spent on certain functions. So Spirit Aviation holdings ended the month with only 118 million in unrestricted cash. And that's not much when your airline is losing a lot of money each month. How much was it losing? Well, Spirit had been losing 30, 40, 50 million a month. Spirit's operating loss for March was almost 157 million. Seriously, the March operating loss was five times as big as the February loss. That $157 million operating loss. That means Spirit was losing 5 million per day by operating. Another way to look at it, Total back of the napkin calculations by me. But Spirit was roughly losing 50 to $60 per passenger. Everyone mourns the loss of Spirit low fares, sure, because lenders and creditors were subsidizing fares to the tune of $50 to $60 per passenger. Air travel is cheap when someone else pays a big chunk of your ticket, but that just can't last forever and obviously couldn't last into May for Spirit. Spirit's net loss for the month of March was $427 million one month. That one month was nearly as much as Spirit reported in losses for all of 2023. Obviously the 427 million is inflated by one time reorganization items. But the operating loss for the month of 157 million. Isn't that simple math of revenue from customers, which was about 256 million, minus the cost to operate the airline, about 412 million. I don't mean to beat a dead airline, but I do think it's important to understand why Spirit shut down when it did. Things were really bad financially inside the company, and they were clearly getting worse each day this spring. The operating costs just kept going up and up. Easy to understand why creditors wanted to get out of the business of subsidizing tickets for a couple million travelers each month. Okay, before we bring in Brian Bedford, I want to thank our sponsors for making this podcast possible and great example making it possible for me to do things like go to Washington and talk to the FAA administrator in person. Thanks to Cirium Cirium offers the most accurate and precise data and analytics to enable airlines to optimize planning, operations and passenger services. The right intelligence drives operational efficiencies, enables you to predict market shifts, and helps airlines respond quickly to maximize revenue, manage costs and seize commercial opportunity. Visit cirium.com for more. In addition, we appreciate Ontario International Airport, which is celebrating a decade of local control. Thanks to public support, the local community reclaimed ont and and revived it as a vital gateway in Southern California and ensured the airport is ready to soar even higher in the years to come. Visit flyontario.com 10 to learn the story and find out how you can join the yearlong celebration of how a decade of local control has turned ONT into one of California's fastest growing and most economical airports. Finally, thanks to Infinity Flight Academy, the path to the flight deck starts long before a pilot reaches the airlines. At Infinity Flight Academy, they're proud to serve as a flight training partner for the American Airlines Cadet Academy, helping prepare the next generation of professional airline pilots. Infinity Flight Academy's training is structured, standardized and built around the discipline today's airlines expect from day one. For future pilots pursuing a career at the highest level, Infinity Flight Academy is proud to be part of that journey. Infinity Flight Academy training tomorrow's airline pilots through the American Airlines Cadet Academy okay, now let's talk about the past, the present, and the future of America's skies.
- [08:51]
Scott McCartney
Brian Bedford was sworn as the 20th FAA administrator last July. He leads an agency of 40,000 people that is responsible for the safety of 3 million people each day in some 45,000 flights. More than that, he is deep into the job of rebuilding and modernizing the nation's air traffic control system. Brian is, I believe, the first former airline CEO to serve as the head of the faa, right?
- [09:17]
Brian Bedford
I think that's right.
- [09:18]
Scott McCartney
We've had airport people and pilot people and everything else but. But first, former CEO. He brings a 35 year airline career to the job. He is also a multiengine instrument rated pilot. Brian led Republic Airways for 26 years during which Republic grew from 85 million in annual revenue with 36 turbo props to more than 3 billion in revenue and a fleet of more than 250 jets. He also launched the first airline owned pilot training academy in the U.S. brian graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor's degree in finance and accounting. It is a delight to be with you here in Washington. It's such a critical and challenging time for the FAA and for air travel. Welcome to Airlines Confidential Brian.
- [10:08]
Brian Bedford
Thanks Scott. It's great to be here with you today.
- [10:11]
Scott McCartney
So we always start with what we affectionately call the Ben Baldanza question because Ben taught me that this was a great opening question and people in this business usually have interesting stories and so the question always is how did you get into this crazy business?
- [10:27]
Brian Bedford
So after I graduated from college I was a CPA and I was practicing with KPMG out of our Tampa office. And this was in the early 1980s which was right on the heels of airline deregulation. So we saw a lot of new entrants coming into the market. You know the people expresses of the world, Frontier Airlines and of course there was a lot of bankruptcies and reorganization that was going on and Pete Marwick had a bankruptcy practice and I became absorbed in that practice. So we had several clients, PeopleXpress, Air Florida, Florida Express, Frontier. I was on all of these bankruptcy reorganizations and ultimately several of these carriers were acquired by Continental and I ultimately got into the industry through that.
- [11:11]
Scott McCartney
Interesting, interesting. And the jet fuel got in your veins pretty quick.
- [11:16]
Brian Bedford
Honestly I think it was in my DNA from birth. My parents were both NASA people. I'll have to show you some pictures of my mom working with Ed White on the Gemini missions.
- [11:28]
Podcast Host / Narrator
No kidding.
- [11:29]
Brian Bedford
Yeah, so it was a fascinating time. We grew up in Florida and when President Kennedy announced that we're going to go to the moon and bring a man home safely. My dad was an unemployed engineer at the time and all of a sudden NASA's hiring like crazy. And my mom ended up working at Honeywell working on the guidance systems and my dad was a computer program on the Saturn V. Wow, how cool.
- [11:53]
Scott McCartney
How cool. All right, let's talk about modernization because I really think this is. And everything's kind of interconnected with that in terms of controller staffing, airspace management and all that. We just had a great tour of your smart lab here at FAA headquarters. Really interesting stuff going on. I talk about this a lot on the podcast, but I started writing about modernization in the late 1990s. I went to Australia and New Zealand because they had developed satellite based systems and the FAA had failed at it to manage the Pacific. The US was supposed to develop its system and the other guys and the FAA ultimately had to turn to, I think it was New Zealand. One of the contractors partnered with them, bend in towers in Montreal, in Toronto and London Heathrow to write about systems that were in use elsewhere that had far better efficiency and safety than what the FAA had. There's a continuous narrative to this. Effort after effort to modernize and improve yielded only incremental results. So you've lived this as an airline operator. What makes you think it's different now?
- [13:15]
Brian Bedford
Scott, I think everybody listening to the podcast would understand that in order to do big projects, you have to have strong leadership, strong vision. And President Trump and Secretary Duffy bring an absolute relentless vision to modernize this system. I think President Trump believes he missed the opportunity. Back in 2017, you may recall him announcing, we're going to build a brand new air traffic control system. And then the airline industry hijacked the narrative and turned it into a privatization debate. And we spent three years arguing who is going to pay for it. And we missed the opportunity to modernize. You know, the Biden Buttigieg administration hated airlines, did not want to support aviation, did not invest in aviation. And then President Trump has a second shot at it. And he made it absolutely clear we will end by 2028 with a brand new world class aviation system. And I was thrilled to be a part of that.
- [14:14]
Scott McCartney
Yeah. Is that time frame possible?
- [14:19]
Brian Bedford
It's absolutely achievable. We, we started what we refer to as the brand new air traffic control system program, bnats. Everybody hates that, more so than Secretary Duffy. But that's the label we have, that's what we're running with. And BNats is essentially one third of what we would think of as modernization. It is pulling out all of the 1970s and 80s technology and replacing it with 21st century technology. So if you've been in our facilities, you've seen, you know, copper wires everywhere. There's nothing digital, it's all analog systems. We can't support it, we can't maintain it. It's all beyond economic obsolete. So we're pulling it out and replacing it with brand new stuff. But if we stop there, we would have a more reliable, but still highly inefficient national airspace system. So in order to get modernization, we have to get not just the equipage, we have to get the people so strategy right, and we have to get the airspace design right. And we are moving on all three of those pillars.
- [15:23]
Scott McCartney
And what we just saw in the Smart Lab seemed like a very fully integrated system that takes a lot of stuff that's out there that's been developed. Right. Traffic, traffic flow, real time traffic flows, real time, air traffic control, communications, real time cameras that get gates and everything else and integrates that. Is that going to be the strategy of. I mean, as I said, a lot of this stuff is out there and we just haven't pulled it into the US Are you trying to create something new with the brand new system or are you trying to take existing technology and put it on the front line?
- [16:08]
Brian Bedford
Well, it's a great question, I think, and I try not to dwell on this when I think I've been in nearly 50 of our facilities over my first 40 weeks on the job and every time I go in there I'm seeing more and more new equipment in our facilities, but I see a lot of the old stuff still. And they're going to become a tipping point where we have to ultimately move off of the analog and onto the digital. And I feel very confident that we have a really discreet line of sight on all of the 14 different work streams that we are managing in order to deliver that by the end of 2028. But then you start talking about how do we change the innovation cycle at the faa? We innovate at the speed of Boeing, which is decades long. Right. And we're trying to anticipate what will, for example, the next narrow body mid market aircraft look like and what kind of technology will that need to have. And that work is going on at our tech centers and we're working with industry, but that 20 year, 25 year innovation cycle is leaving the rest of modernization behind. And so what we were trying to do is essentially disconnect ourselves from that. Hey, what's the system need to look like in 2040 versus what can the system look like in 2027 and use commercially available off the shelf technology. So the Smart Lab that you were in is actually a process that we were talking about replacing two legacy traffic management systems. We have something called traffic flow management and time based flow management. These are two systems that we use to try to more articulately manage ground delay programs, airborne Delay holds and traffic sequencing. Right. And we thought, hey, there are better tools out there, machine learning, AI enabled tools that'll help us make better decisions. And we started that process in November. We opened up the labs in March because we started widening our aperture on, well, wait a second, let's use first principles and try to understand what are these tools trying to fix. And what they're trying to fix is massive amounts of imbalance in the airspace system that we are tactically managing. And we're asking our controllers, or primarily our TRACON controllers and tower controllers, to solve all of these problems in real time. But if we step back and say, well, what's the fundamental cause of the problem? It's how airlines optimize their schedules individually, not as a national airspace system. And we thought, could we build a digital twin using machine learning and AI enabled tools to actually replicate what the NAS would look like with a future schedule? And the answer was yes. We found three vendors, Palantir, Thales, asi. They came in, they set up the labs, they're competing to build the digital twin, and as they have to say, accomplish that mission. Then our aperture expanded even more. What else can we do with this to optimize the Earth system? And you saw a sneak peek of what the future can look like in terms of better utilizing the airspace, reducing their controller workload, and frankly improving the customer experience by taking out unnecessary block hour pads, reducing fuel costs, actually moving from point A to point B. Faster. Transformational stuff.
- [19:37]
Scott McCartney
And, and, and part of that is scheduling. Is it going to be difficult to, to get airlines to schedule without the big peaks that basically force delays? Right, because if you have too many airplanes coming at the same time, then there's got to be ground delay programs, miles and trail, slow down the speed, all kinds of delays that controllers have to implement on flights because scheduling is off.
- [20:08]
Brian Bedford
So that was one of the most fascinating learnings that we saw with the digital twins. We can actually go back and replay a schedule and see how close would our system predict what actually happened. And we're sitting here at a 96, 97% R squared on the confidence that we have that the system's predictive capabilities will actually allow us to look at future schedules and see how they would operate. And it's not a pretty picture, Scott. We know today if we don't intervene, schedules that are going to operate in June are going to operate with a significant amount of delay, cancellation and flight trajectories that are actually designed to collide with one another, that we then expect Air traffic controllers to tactically deconflict over the course of the day, which they do a magnificent job. But we can do better. We can.
- [21:00]
Scott McCartney
And that's if you have perfect weather, then you mix in summertime storms into that and it gets even worse, Right?
- [21:06]
Brian Bedford
Yes. And our predictive weather capabilities in this new technology are vastly superior to what we use today. We essentially use a National Weather Service tool for the most part. That's giving us a pretty good line of sight from ground level up to about 15,000ft. But obviously airplanes fly, you know, between 30 and 40,000ft and the weather's different up there. And we're making, I think, frankly, poor decisions on airspace that will open and close based on incorrect weather processing.
- [21:32]
Scott McCartney
Yeah.
- [21:33]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Let's pause a minute and thank the Executive MBA in Aviation at the University of Colorado Denver, which is entirely appropriate because while I was in the administrator's office near the National Mall, the first class of CU Denver EMBA and aviation students was at the FAA command center nearby. The Executive MBA in Aviation at CU Denver is the first degree of its kind in the world TIT taught by industry experts and designed for ambitious leaders from across the aviation ecosystem. With classes located at Denver International Airport and week long residencies in Washington D.C. and at airports around the world, students experience a hybrid flexible course structure that balances in person and online classes without career interruption. Go to Business UC Denver to learn more. Now back to Brian Bedford.
- [22:27]
Scott McCartney
So you talked about some of the changes that you see and when you go around to different facilities, what's been the biggest achievement so far that you think is making a difference?
- [22:39]
Brian Bedford
I'd say over the course of the first three months I was here, I wanted to, you can imagine as an operator I came with certain biases.
- [22:48]
Scott McCartney
Yeah, yeah.
- [22:48]
Brian Bedford
You know, certain expectations. But I didn't want to be influenced by my personal bias. I wanted to actually go out and talk to the frontline associates at the faa. So getting out in the field. And so we went on a tour literally from the Potomac TRACON all the way up into Anchorage and Bethel and Quintehut, Alaska. Seeing the tools that we have out there and what the real need is. So modernization isn't a nice to have. I mean, we urgently need to modernized the system just cannot support the amount of traffic that we have. But what realizes you start asking, well, why is the agency historically been unable to deliver on some of the modernization goals? And some of it comes down just to the organization's design. You know, I had 16 direct reports. I don't know Any manager that can effectively manage that many direct lines of sight and you become a bottle bottleneck. So redesigning the organization for the FAA of the future was a time consuming, but I think we ended up in a very successful place that will unlock more urgency and more clarity frankly for our leaders to actually understand what's going on beyond their silos. Tearing down those silos and reinventing a again a sense of speed and agility that is unprecedented it at the faa.
- [24:07]
Scott McCartney
Very cool. It seems like there besides the management aspect, you need money to get this done and you need time. Do you need more of both? Do you need more money, need more time?
- [24:23]
Brian Bedford
It's a great question. No, we don't have more time. We need to get this done. The President wants it done by the end of 2028 and we will will get it done by the end of 2028. We do need two things on financing. So we were blessed to get $12.5 billion from Congress to begin the modernization work. That budget was allocated in a very prescriptive way. And what we're going to ultimately determine is that we need to spend all 12 and a half billion, but not necessarily the way the Congress allocated the money. So. So we are going to need some flexibility to utilize the budgeted funds to complete the modernization of the equipage. When we get into the airspace redesign side, there are two unfunded projects that absolutely must be completed if we're going to successfully deliver on the President and Secretary's vision of a world class aviation infrastructure. One of those is Getting from our 1980s compact computer server technology that's in each one of our 313 air traffic facilities. That's the floppy disks and very small on prem compute power which limits our ability to actually see the NAS beyond any individual air traffic facility. So we need to get off prem into the cloud. And with the cloud we get cybersecurity. With the cloud we get unlimited compute power. With the cloud we get the ability to iterate the entire NAs instead of 313 individual pieces of the NAs. So we need money for that. And then secondly we need essentially to go from the three legacy technology stacks we have stars, erams and atops into a holistic common automation platform in order to give our controllers the tools that they need to be successful.
- [26:18]
Scott McCartney
Are there systems out there that will do that for you or is this create a whole new air traffic control system?
- [26:27]
Brian Bedford
No, there are there, there are. First of all we've got, you know, two incumbents, Leidos and Raytheon. That both have been working on building a common automation platform. We've seen it, you know, we think it, it can be a solution for us. And then there are a dozen other vendors out there that we'll talk to as we source this out. But the smart lab that you saw, that operates on what we call the strategic side. So there's the safety side, which is where the traffic management happens today, traffic separation, and then there's the strategic where we want to optimize the nas. There will be a point in time where as the strategic demonstrates just how, how powerful it is, the need for the separation tools actually gets smaller. And so where that interplay ultimately lands is a tbd. But I do think that we have a great selection of potential vendor solutions for the common automation platform. But it's one of those things again, when we think of modernization, you know, we've got to get the equipment right, we've got to go from analog to digital, but we've also got to get from limited on premises compute power to the cloud. And with a common automation platform and
- [27:45]
Scott McCartney
just for listeners not familiar, stars is the terminal control used by tracons and towers and eram is the enroute system. Very good centers, very good. Tops is the Oceanic.
- [27:59]
Brian Bedford
That's right.
- [28:00]
Scott McCartney
It was atops that sent me to the failure of the first Harris contract, I believe with atops that sent me to Australia 30 years ago or whatever it was.
- [28:11]
Brian Bedford
Yeah, it's remarkable. How so? Even though these technology stacks are extremely old, we've invested tens of billions of dollars in the conflict probes and how the conflict probe probe algorithms work. And we have, we have a high, high, I mean like 10 to the minus 9 level of confidence in the conflict probes. But let me tell you what many people don't realize. These conflict probes can only predict 18 minutes into the future.
- [28:41]
Scott McCartney
Yeah.
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Brian Bedford
With machine learning and AI, it's a math problem. Right. We're looking at flight trajectories in four dimensions, three dimensions of geography and time. Right. That's the fourth dimension mentioned. And we don't want to know where the plane is. We want to be able to predict where the plane is going. And that's what the smart system is actually doing for us. And now we have a line of sight that's hours long. It's the entirety. And we've got predictive confidence that's up to 4 seconds of arrival at your time of descent. I mean this stuff is precise, Scott.
- [29:14]
Scott McCartney
Right. And it should be automatic. You shouldn't have to put probe something if there's a problem, it should automatically be telling people that there's a problem ahead.
- [29:24]
Brian Bedford
Well, so let me, let me, let me use this an opportunity to clarify something. Yeah, those safety tools are never going away, right? I mean, the conflict probes are going to remain. That is sacrosanct. We're not changing that. What we're saying is let's lay on layer on an additional level of sight. Let's layer on an additional machine learning AI enabled tool, a tool that the controllers can see that can help identify something beyond a traditional sector so that when they're making a decision to do a traffic separation, they have a line of sight that goes throughout the entirety of the aircraft journey, not just the 50 miles of their particular traffic sector.
- [30:03]
Scott McCartney
And if you can get there, that's how you increase capacity. Right. Because then we could start talking about maybe we can reduce miles and trails if we have more confidence that it's going to operate safely or things like that, right?
- [30:14]
Brian Bedford
That is absolutely correct. So today, when we believe the system is beyond its capacity, we actually go the other direction in order to add safety margin. We increase miles and trail, we reduce the flow because, you know, whether the constraint is the Runway or the gate or the human response constraint, because we're
- [30:36]
Scott McCartney
short controllers or the controller sector, you don't want to overload a particular sector with more airplanes than the controller can handle.
- [30:43]
Brian Bedford
Exactly right. So all of these dimensions of the, both the strategic, the tactical and certainly the safety architecture have to be choreographed.
- [30:54]
Scott McCartney
Yeah. All right, let's take a step back for a minute. I'm curious about the FAA that you found when you came in. You came in about six months after the DCA crash, which I think was a real turning point for the agency. And with that, you testified yesterday about that the FAA had failed to address warning signs. That was in line with the NTSB findings that what surprised you when you first got here? What did you find
- [31:33]
Brian Bedford
so on. On the one hand, I found a group of dedicated career civil servants who I think were deeply affected by the accident of 5342. So I think everybody here takes the traffic separation safety responsibilities with absolute serious and personal care. The air traffic organization has always had a can do attitude. We can get this done, we can deliver the goods. And let's look at the last 15, 16 years they did. And we can look at the Colgan tragedy. That certainly was an air traffic FAA tragedy. Having said that, we potentially were getting a little complacent, you know, that we could continue to manage things the way we were managing them, even though we were seeing more and more activity coming into the airspace. If you go look back at 2019, moving into the COVID period, we saw capacity go way, way down. Right? And it took quite a while, you know, for demand to come back to where the staffing shortages were actually starting to show, you know, concern. And I think that's what we were seeing in 2023, 2024, and going into 2025. That's when we were seeing these 85 near misses. That, again, I think the FAA should absolutely have looked at that data and drawn the conclusion that the airspace design with the helicopter routes and continuing to use the visual to land on Runway 33 was a bad design and should have fixed design. Now, I'll tell you just so we're clear, the safety system in the United States is built on layers and layers of safety. It's not just the ato. We have a partnership with the airline industry and with the manufacturing industry to make sure that they're playing their role in safety. I can tell you, Republic Airways, when I was there, we have a huge operation in DCA. And through our FOQA data, through our own SMS, we identified a series of unstabilized approaches into Runway 3.3. And when our Foqua team got into the lab and started understanding what was driving these unstabilized approaches, what we realized is the air traffic controllers were asking us to change. Change from. We'd been cleared to land on Runway one, shooting the ils. That's what's set up in the cockpit. That's what the pilots have briefed, and we're coming over the marker. And the controllers say, hey, can we deviate you to the circle to land on? Run visual on three. Three, yeah. And pilots want to accommodate air traffic control. They accept, and immediately their heads go down into the glass, setting up front the visual to 3.3, so the workload increases.
- [34:35]
Scott McCartney
That was exactly what happened with the PSA flight.
- [34:39]
Brian Bedford
That's right. So our answer to this, I think we fixed this in 2015. We saw this and fixed it. Our answer was we didn't say the pilots couldn't accept the visual, but we said, if you're past a certain point on the approach, you can't accept the visual. Right. And so, you know, we wanted them far enough back where they could do the workload to, you know, reconfigure the plane for the new approach and still have their heads up out of the glass doing actual visual separation. So as a safety layer, airlines also own a piece of this. And I guess the question we should have is how are we collaborating between these various foqa regimes at all of our different airlines to look at best practices and how, how are we bringing those best practices across the spans and layers of the aviation ecosystem?
- [35:28]
Scott McCartney
Yeah. And there's always tension inside the airline.
- [35:30]
Brian Bedford
Right.
- [35:30]
Scott McCartney
Because they want as many flights as possible. Dca, nobody's going to say, hey, maybe we should dial back.
- [35:37]
Brian Bedford
I think, I think there is a camaraderie where we want to help the controllers as airlines and the controllers want to help the pilots on board. Everybody wants the same thing. We want, want absolute safety. But we have successfully operated the visual to 3.3 with all this helicopter traffic for years. And I think that's where we get into a bit of a complacency. And then you unfortunately have this horrific tragedy January 29, 2025, and we're sort of shaken to our core and we realize, okay, if we had this problem here, could we possibly have the same problem problem someplace else?
- [36:16]
Scott McCartney
Yeah.
- [36:17]
Brian Bedford
And sometimes you'll have to come back and go into our new aviation safety office lab and see the tools that they're using. They look very similar to what we demoed for you in the SMART lab, but we have tools now that give us a real time line of sight. We could actually go look at these same sorts of environments. And so we came out with the general notice in March essentially eliminating, prohibiting, prohibiting the controller's use of visual separation between mixed traffic in all airports in class B, C and terminal radar controlled space. So no more visual separation, no more offloading our workload onto pilots at those critical levels of flight and the arrival and departure fixes corridors. Now they'll be under positive controller supervised radar based separation.
- [37:07]
Scott McCartney
Was, was that re examination of so many things. Was that what, what led to banning the simultaneous parallel approaches at sfo?
- [37:17]
Brian Bedford
That's exactly right. That same new safety system. This is a Palantir Foundry product that is taking all of the FAA safety data and giving us a, a visual presentation of areas of concern. And it's, it's now out of the lab and it's actually in production, you know, with our new integrated Safety Management Office. And yes, what they were seeing in January and February was a very concerning trend of visual separation deviations on the parallels. And sfo, we can fix that. We can build better, more precise offset arrivals. So we, we can and we will fix it and we will get the capacity back up. But we couldn't ignore it.
- [38:02]
Scott McCartney
Yeah, yeah. So how would you Describe the current state of the FAA in general, not just DCA that we've been talking about. And all you talked about, the reorg in terms of upper management, what's the current state and what's on your to do work list.
- [38:24]
Brian Bedford
So one of the things in my career I've come to learn is if you want to get big projects done, you have to have relentless focus. And one of the ways we can drive relentless focus is tell all 44,000 men and women of the FAA exactly what our priorities are. So we put out a 2026 flight plan. It's available, you can see it on our website. It's dovetails in with our modernization strategy. I told you, our modernization strategy is built on three pillars. Airspace redesign people are the foundation of the NAS and obviously the RE equipment. John B. Natz we put out three pillars for our 2026 priorities. Safety, people, modernization, straightforward. Everybody understands what we're trying to get accomplished. And we have very many measurable objectives for what we would call success. And this is the first time the FAA has ever published a one year plan. Generally, it publishes a five year plan, which I've come to realize is because I wouldn't be here at the end of five years to be accountable for it. But now we build accountability for the executive team to our frontline associates. This is what we intend to deliver. And guess what we're going to publish in Q4, a 2027 flight plan. We're going to tell you how we did on 26, the good, bad and Ugly. And we're going to tell you what the plan is for 2027. And I hope, Scott, as we are transparent and as we are accountable, we'll start to change not just the culture of FAA to a culture of, you know, not just a just culture, but an accountability culture, but also demonstrate that we can actually do better big things and build pride back into the organization and build a sense of optimism and accomplishment.
- [40:14]
Scott McCartney
Yeah, no, I mean that certainly everybody used to always say, best in the world, safest in the world, you handle the most traffic in the world and in many ways still should be considered best in the world, but for all kinds of reasons, fell behind.
- [40:33]
Brian Bedford
Yes. And you know, again, I know everybody wants to, you know, point the finger at the faa, but we are all accountable. You could go look at the last three decades. You mentioned it. You were talking about this in the 1990s. Well, there are literally hundreds, Scott, hundreds of General Accounting Office audits, Inspector General audits, OMB audits, Congressional research projects, you know, and they all come and say the same thing. The same system is grinding to a halt, we need to invest in it and then nothing ever gets done. So whose fault is that?
- [41:08]
Scott McCartney
Right. And by the way, you didn't get the funding out of the Congress over
- [41:12]
Brian Bedford
there and you've got. So the vision has to start at the top. It's got to start with the President of the United States. If he wants this to get done, then he's got to rally the troops in Congress to fund it. And he's got to get the right people in charge of the deal, DOT and the FAA to get it done. And I think, humbly speaking, I think the president has done all of that.
- [41:33]
Scott McCartney
All right. We talked a little bit before we started recording about the controller shortage and the report that came out on Friday about full employment and a full employment Target that's roughly 2,000 people lower. The logic was, was in part deploying scheduling software that would raise average time on position from about 4 hours per 8 hour shift to 5 hours. So two questions. Given the track record on software projects, you feel good about this target not counting chickens before they hatch, so to speak. And secondly, I am curious why NATCA wasn't involved in this. They're going to have to be a partner at some point in this, aren't they? Or not?
- [42:26]
Brian Bedford
Scott, it's a great question. And just to provide some context, there is a requirement in the law that every year the FAA will provide the Congress with three snapshots of critical safety workers and speak inspectors, technicians and controllers. And so this document that went up to the Hill, it satisfies that obligation that the FAA has to provide that visibility to Congress. If we go back to the 2024 reauthorization bill, it recognizes the fact that there was an ongoing, in fact, decades long dispute between the faa, the controllers union on what was an appropriate staffing level. They each had their own model. The FAA had one model, the union had a different model. And they would both go to Congress and say, here's what we think is the right answer. And Congress basically finally said, we don't know which one of you to believe. We want the National Academy of Science to conduct the study. The National Academy of Science through the Transportation Research Board came in and they sat down with NACA and said, show us your model. And then they sat down with the FAA and said, show us your model. And then they worked with both parties to try to come up with what they felt was the appropriate level of staffing. And guess what? They picked a number that was below what NATCA showed and was higher than what the FAA showed. But now, instead of having two models, one, we have one, which is the Transportation Research Board model.
- [44:06]
Scott McCartney
Now, based in science.
- [44:08]
Brian Bedford
Based in science. But here's where I think we're getting lost in the numbers. Whether you said the right number is 14,600 controllers or 12,600 controllers, we have 11,000 controllers. So what's fundamentally changing in 2026? Nothing is changing. We are accelerating hiring. Our academy is full. We have 2,000 people in the academy from last year. We're adding another 2200 this year, another 2300 next year. So nothing about the number 14, 6, 12, 6. Nothing about the number is changing our speed with which we're onboarding training controllers.
- [44:56]
Scott McCartney
You're not letting the foot off the gas.
- [44:58]
Brian Bedford
So then what's the big deal? You might ask what's the big deal about this? Because I think how we ultimately target each individual facility changes how controllers are allowed to move from one facility to another, which gets to another big flaw in how the system works. It's something called ncept. And here our management team, working hand in hand with the controllers are almost to the point of coming up with a much better design on that model, which I think will help us get to full facility health faster. Then we go to something called the basic watch schedule. That is the next conversation that we have to have with the union in order to make sure that we are building efficient schedules. Schedules, whether we continue to build them by hand or we automate them. Let's not get lost with the automation. Let's just focus on the fact that we have to build efficient schedules. Today we have 313 different basic watch schedules at every one of our facilities. That's not going to continue to work. Yeah, it's not manageable. Okay. And we can't make good decisions if we don't actually understand the data. And there's no data, Scott, other than when they're plugged into the machine and they're not plugged into the machine. And today they're plugged into the machine four hours a day. They could be plugged into the machine seven hours a day. I'm not suggesting they should be.
- [46:29]
Scott McCartney
No. It used to be closer to five
- [46:31]
Brian Bedford
hours, but it used to be closer to five. Yes. And so we have to understand where are we losing that productivity? So, look, we're going to go do the work. We're going to do the hard work with the NATCA union leadership team and our facility management team, and in bringing in third party facilitators to help us bridge these differences and understandings and look for best practices. So again, we're on a journey. We're on a journey of discovery. We're on a journey of trying to build more efficiency, and we're on that journey. At the same time, we're trying to build mo much more strategic optimization of how the NASA actually operates. All designed to reduce controller workload and increase their ability to focus on the most critical aspects of their day, which is separating traffic, is part of that.
- [47:19]
Scott McCartney
There's been, I think John Ostrower and Air Current reported on, looking at the Sabre Global headquarters headquarters in South Lake as a potential sort of national airspace management thing, taking a lot of the regional control centers and consolidating them into one large one, which seemed to me would give you a whole lot more efficiency and flexibility in terms of staffing. And, and you know, if, hey, you know, Seattle doesn't have a whole lot of load here, but Miami does. So, you know, if it was all consolidated, you'd have more flexibility perhaps. Is that something that's going on?
- [48:10]
Brian Bedford
So in the one big beautiful bill, there is something in round numbers, $3 billion of funding out of the 12 and a half billion billion that requires the FAA to evaluate the opportunity to consolidate facilities. And we have several locations. Dallas is one where we have a very large TRACON and a very large enroute center. Could those be consolidated? We have a similar setup in Houston. A very large enroute center, a very large tracon. Could those be consolidated? I think the, the reality is we have a lot of brick and mortar facilities in the national airspace system today that are extraordinarily old, well beyond their design limits and the cost to invest to modernize them versus the cost to simply replace them. I think the $3 billion funding gives us a lot of flexibility to both look at greenfield, build new sites where we can have consolidation. And Florida is a great example of a place where we have a lot of display spirit facilities that are really old, that need to be modernized. Or can we go to an existing facility and the SABRA facility that you point out is a high tech facility designed for exactly what air traffic management does. So that would be in my mind, a lower cost, quicker to market turnkey solution for us to take out. Take this consolidation out on a test drive in Dallas.
- [49:40]
Scott McCartney
Do you feel like you, is consolidation going to be a battle itself, like a base closing thing all of a sudden? You know, New York doesn't want to lose its Dracon or whatever.
- [49:51]
Brian Bedford
Well, look, one thing we agree on is we still are short controllers, right? And so they are a precious human resource for us. And so I think we, we can't just disconnect the human element from any control consolidation conversation. So I'm not envisioning a BRAC at this point, but I am envisioning that we have a lot of 40, 50, and 60 year old buildings where we're spending billions of dollars a year to maintain them. And it would be much, it'd be much more cost effective for the American taxpayer if we simply consolidate and rebuild some of these facilities, whether that's from the ground up or finding a terrific hidden gem in Dallas.
- [50:39]
Scott McCartney
Yeah. Okay. Speaking of money, you're very familiar with ticket taxes and the airport and airway trust fund. Talked about it a lot on the podcast. And I saw recently that the FAA had moved to start collecting user fees for commercial space launches and reentries. Those are growing in frequency. They take up a lot of airspace and they take up a lot of controller time. So bravo for that. What about private jets?
- [51:13]
Brian Bedford
So the implementation of user fees on space launch and reentry was an obligation that the FAA had again under the 2020 Reauthorization Act. And if Congress tells us to collect user fees on private jets, you can bet your bottom dollar will go out and collect user fees on private jets. Right now we don't have that authorization from Congress to do it. So I have no authority as the FAA administrator to impose a fee on business jets.
- [51:42]
Scott McCartney
So it would take Congress.
- [51:44]
Brian Bedford
It would take Congress. Yes.
- [51:46]
Scott McCartney
Yeah. Okay. This is me. Good luck with that.
- [51:49]
Brian Bedford
No, no. Well, I'm telling you the truth. We don't, you know, we are a safety agency. We're also a reliability and efficiency agency. You know, we manage the airspace, but we don't set the rates and fees. This was one of those rare situations where Congress asked us to impose a fee and it very prescriptively told us how to impose the fee and we implemented what Congress told us to do.
- [52:15]
Scott McCartney
Uh huh. Okay. I want to ask about your relationship with Secretary Duffy, because you, you come to this with enormous experience and knowledge, and he doesn't. And so I'm curious how that affects the working relationship or if it does, or how. How are things going on that front?
- [52:35]
Brian Bedford
Well, Secretary Duffy recruited me, so I wouldn't have taken the job to work for the fellow if I didn't have. Have a tremendous amount of respect for him. He is a smart guy, lawyer by training, and he understands how the Hill works. I Mean, he was inside the swamp. He gets how business gets done here. I have none of that. And I was very honest with the President that I don't do politics. If I did do them, I'd do them poorly, I'm sure. So my job here is to help the Secretary achieve the President's vision for building a brand new air traffic control system. But beyond that, what the President's vision is, and certainly Secretary Duffy is incredibly passionate about this, is we want the safest system in the world, bar none. Secretary Duffy's been in the labs. He's been in all the smart labs. He's been in our safety lab, which is located in the dot. I mean, so he's seeing what we're doing. He is hands on. He is a great partner, and he's been a champion for what we're trying to do. And I sure hope he brings the next $10 billion home, because I'm counting on him.
- [53:41]
Scott McCartney
Yeah. All right, well, good. Good. So two last things. Quick. I feel like I have to ask this question because a lot of airline people really were wondering if in the government shutdown down, did air traffic control, the forced cuts on airline schedules, was that about politics or was it really about safety?
- [54:08]
Brian Bedford
Absolutely about safety, 100%. And this is one of those early confidence builders, I think, for the agency. So you can imagine this happened before reorganization was effectuated. Reorganization got effectuated. So we're talking about, you know, late October, where the safety regime was, was in an organization called avs, and that's the aviation safety team. Right. But they do more than just safety. Their aircraft certification, they're our flight standards team, they're our compliance management team. Their drug and alcohol testing, they're the flight medical office. So they do a lot of things. But, you know, aviation safety brought up to me concerns about what they were seeing, again, warning signals in the NASS and felt it was very odd. Scott, I'll tell you, they actually came to me like, do you want to know this, Brian? You know, do you want me to tell you what we're seeing, or do you not want to know? I'm like, well, of course I want to know. What are you seeing? And they showed me the data, and it. It was concerning. And then we brought the air traffic organization in, and the initial response was, we think we're okay. Boy, that sounded an awful lot like January 29, 2025. And we had that deep, respectful conversation. And the ATO quickly said, if you guys don't think this is safe, then we will agree we should make a change. And the only thing we could do, frankly was deflate the pressure on the system by reducing the amount of traffic we were managing. So I think it was all data driven and it was the first real opportunity for me to be able to support the safety team and to show how the air traffic organization was going to cooperate. So it was a great, I think, learning moment for us and it has again, we've now seen that move into the San Francisco, the Van Nuys, Burbank deconfliction, the general notice on mixed traffic. I mean, so we're seeing a. And oh, by the way, we were working on transponders on airport vehicles for months and I wish we had a line of sight to get that done prior to the LaGuardia situation. But our focus was to light up airports that did do not have asdx because our belief was AS DX was the solution, but where we were doing surface awareness initiatives, we wanted to get those vehicles illuminated because that's how our controllers can see them. So look, the agency is identifying real risk in the national airspace system, both on the ground and in the air, and it is moving with urgency to close gaps that it sees.
- [56:58]
Scott McCartney
I don't know if you have the authority or not, but it seems like a no brainer that airport vehicles ought to be required to have transponders when there's the ASDX system in place.
- [57:10]
Brian Bedford
So we do have the authority, but it requires rulemaking and rulemaking takes years. And so we tried a different approach which is voluntary. You know, we're making the case and we're providing funding, so.
- [57:25]
Scott McCartney
Yeah, I know, but there's the Port Authority and there's, there are plenty of other airports.
- [57:29]
Brian Bedford
The Port Authority is going to illuminate their vehicles. They've already announced that. And I think we're getting a strong indication that other airports that have are both as the X and surface awareness are willing to illuminate. But now we're moving into a supply chain bottleneck.
- [57:48]
Scott McCartney
Yeah. Oh, interesting. All right, let's. Last question, and this one probably be a whole nother podcast, but your view on EVTOL drones, autonomous passenger aircraft, sometime in the future, do you feel like you have the resources to handle all the new technology coming?
- [58:07]
Brian Bedford
Great question, Scott. And the easy answer would be to say no, we could always use more resources. Okay. In all seriousness, we do need more resources in space. Sure. We had Gwynne Shotwell in here earlier this week giving us the five year view of where SpaceX wants to be, which is 10,000 launches a year, we've
- [58:30]
Scott McCartney
got 1,000 a year.
- [58:33]
Brian Bedford
Hope I'm not giving up anything confidential there, but you know, that's the SpaceX vision in order to get to the moon and to Mars. And I feel, when I heard that, I felt like we're playing from behind. And so I think that is an area and hopefully, you know, our plan would be to use the, the fee, user fees to fund more resources to go into space. But on evital, it's a different challenge. You know, we have a number of novel technologies that are going into these vehicles, batteries, autonomous flying, you know, the tilt rotor. You know, I mean, there's a lot
- [59:09]
Scott McCartney
of the tilt rotor thing with the Osprey. That has always been a difficult thing.
- [59:14]
Brian Bedford
Yeah. So I think the much in the way we were looking at unmanned traffic management of drones, we create sandboxes and we actually let industry go innovate and demonstrate how they can comply. So we create a more of a, a performance based system as opposed to a prescriptive compliance based system. And when we demonstrate, here's the performance we want you to achieve for us to feel comfortable that you can operate safely. And then we let industry go figure out a way how best for them to innovate to that level of performance. We did that with our Mosaic rulemaking, which I think will unleash innovation in light sport aircraft. And we're, I think, doing the same thing ultimately and how we're going to ultimately certify advanced air mobility. And so we've created eight sandboxes across the country and we're asking state and local government, tribal communities, utility organizations, local communities to get engaged. Do you want this product? And if so, let us test this product not with people, but let's test it in real life simulation and we're going to see how these things stand up in service.
- [60:30]
Scott McCartney
Well, Brian, thank you so much. This has been tremendous. All kinds of great information and all kinds of great progress. So congratulations on that and we look forward to so much more. Thrilled that you're doing this and thrilled that you took the time to be with us on Airlines Confidential. Thank you.
- [60:49]
Brian Bedford
Thank you, Scott. It was great being here and I look forward to bringing you back in the not too distant future when we're taking things out of the lab now and starting to deploy them.
- [60:58]
Scott McCartney
Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, we will be right back. With more promotional support provided by the
- [61:04]
Brian Bedford
Ultimate Avgeek website, theairxiv.net a vast collection of airline memorabilia, timetables, route maps, rare cabin and airport photos, special flights and more. All at the archive.net, the hub of air transport history.
- [61:17]
Podcast Host / Narrator
Thanks again to FAA administrator Brian Bedford. I think it's safe to say we all wish him great success in his role because the nation's economy and the safety of everyone who travels by air depends on it. As I said at the top of the show, I am very excited to see progress and far more hopeful than I was when I flew to Washington before the interview. I'm eager to hear what listeners think before we go. Thanks to RTX for its longtime sponsorship of airlines Confidential. RTX rallies more than 180,000 innovators around a powerful vision to create a safer, more connected world with industry leading tools and technology. The RTX Global team works across market leading businesses Collins Aerospace, Pratt and Whitney and Raytheon to drive progress for generations to come together. RTX pushes the boundaries of known science and finds new ways to connect and protect our world. Visit rtx.com to learn more. My deepest appreciation to Brian Bedford not only for talking with us on the podcast, but for all he is doing for air travel in this country. And deepest appreciation to all of you for listening. I'll be back next week with co host Charles Duncan and we're going to be talking food with the CEO of a major catering company.
- [62:40]
Scott McCartney
A little bit of a change of pace.
- [62:43]
Podcast Host / Narrator
How's that for whetting your appetite and leaving you hungry for more airlines Confidential have a great week everyone.
- [62:52]
Brian Bedford
This podcast is produced by mass media infousmedia.net.