Sen. Sheehy Calls for Part 23 Reform and Training Initiatives

Q: What should be done to ensure the nation’s ATC system remains the safest and most efficient in the world?

The FAA is a good organization, but it’s very dated. The bureaucracy is 70 years old. There are new technologies we should be adopting to make our air traffic control system more efficient, effective and safe.

We’ve cut the number of [public use] airports in America … Yet air travel has increased massively. So, as we close more and more airports, we’re driving more and more of that traffic to existing airports, contributing to a lot of these near misses on the ground, runway incursions and more congestion. We’ve got to do everything we can to keep our airports open and invest in that airport infrastructure.

And of course, that means more controllers. We have a lot of arbitrary rules, like a mandatory retirement age of 56 for controllers. That makes no sense. That may have made sense 50 years ago, when people weren’t living as long, but now we can have controllers working effectively much longer.

Q: What are your thoughts surrounding the mental health of America’s aviation workforce, including pilots and air traffic controllers?

Obviously, we’ve learned a lot about mental health in the last 20 years. For me, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan – and my wife, who is also a combat veteran and Marine Corps officer – those wars taught us a lot about mental health and how we need to be more open about it. What we’re learning is that mental health is just like physical health. It’s a process to get treatment and to be healed, and we’ve stigmatized that pursuit too long. Aviation has often been a part of that, where if we think someone’s not right in the head, we immediately excommunicate them from the community, take their license away, ground them, and then that person is out of the workforce. That puts fear into the heart of other people who say, “Well, I’m unwilling now to come forward if I’m thinking I’m having issues, because I’ve seen what’s happened to the others.”

Q: How can the U.S. encourage continued industrywide innovation and development?

The biggest thing is 14 CFR Part 23 reform [and aircraft certification in general]. We need to make sure that you can make airplanes profitably in America – that aircraft innovation can be profitable. The type certification process is so long, arduous and penalizing to those innovators that they either don’t do it, they take their business elsewhere, or they do what Boeing’s been doing with the 737, which is just keep modifying the same airframe over and over again for decades.

Also, my background is aerial firefighting. I was a water bomber pilot, and to innovate in aviation is very challenging. In aerial firefighting, for example, there’s no FAR that covers aerial firefighting. It deserves its own FAR. So, there are many areas where we can push through on the FARs and bring some common sense to it, while encouraging much needed upgrades.

Q: With a shortfall of pilots and aircraft maintenance professionals looming, how can Congress ensure the workforce America needs to maintain the highest levels of safety and efficiency?

We should expand GI Bill eligibility for trade schools, to learn vocational skills and participate in certification programs. Frankly, I’d much rather have a veteran getting out of the service get into aviation and have his GI Bill pay for an A&P certificate or a commercial pilot certificate – starting at private pilot from the beginning all the way to the end – so that they can get a skill that will immediately pay their bills and give them a good paying job.

Q: Proponents say sustainable aviation fuel can create markets for U.S. farmers and cut carbon emissions. Should Congress act to spur production of SAF?

Ultimately, I think we let the free market decide how much SAF should be produced. I think there’s a time and place for government intervention and I think there’s a time and place to let the free market decide. The free market viability of SAF will be decided by the market, and we’ve got to let that run its course.