The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill to reauthorize federal aviation programs and improve air travel amid continuing serious passenger distress and systemic failures, sending the bill to President Biden, who is expected to sign it into law.
The House passed the bill by a vote of 387-26, just days after the Senate passed it by a vote of 88-4.
The bill provides more than $105 billion to the Federal Aviation Administration and $738 million to the National Transportation Safety Board for safety programs, airport modernization and infrastructure projects, technology upgrades, and Next Generation Aviation Systems. It also supports the hiring and training of air traffic controllers, codifies airline passenger refund obligations, limits seat fees for families with children, strengthens protections for passengers with disabilities, enhances aviation workforce development programs, and protects access to air travel at rural airports.
“For more than a century, the United States has led the world in aviation safety and innovation, and this bill is essential to ensure America remains a global leader in aviation,” Rep. Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican and chairman of the Transportation Committee, said in a statement after the vote. “This bill is vital to our economy, millions of American jobs, and the millions of passengers who rely on our national aerospace system every day.”
The final bill, which lawmakers hailed as a timely and necessary investment in the nation’s aviation system and a win for consumers, was the culmination of months of negotiations by the House and Senate committees that oversee federal aviation programs. It was approved after multiple deadlines and short extensions by Congress during a turbulent period in the skies that included runway collisions, aircraft breakdowns and flight disruptions.
Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington, the top Democrat on the Transportation Committee, said the bill “will create a safer, cleaner, greener and more accessible aviation system in America.”
In a statement, he highlighted the measures’ safety and infrastructure improvements, the creation of good-paying aviation jobs, policies that promote new aviation technologies and “strong protections for airline customers.”
Among the consumer protection provisions in the nearly 1,000-page bill are provisions that codify new rules announced by the Department of Transportation that require airlines to “automatically” give passengers full refunds when flights are canceled, delayed or significantly changed, impose standards that require any travel credits offered by airlines in lieu of refunds to be valid for at least five years, and aim to allow families to fly together without being charged extra.
The bill also seeks to address safety and workforce challenges that have plagued the aviation system. It requires the FAA to rapidly increase the hiring and training of air traffic controllers to bolster a stretched workforce. It also directs the agency to increase the deployment of safety technologies to prevent runway crashes. It also mandates the retention of cockpit voice recordings from two to 25 hours to better support investigations of future safety incidents.
Lawmakers, led by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a former Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in an Iraqi insurgent attack and now uses a wheelchair, have introduced legislation aimed at improving air travel for passengers with disabilities. The bill would require the FAA to reevaluate airplane evacuation procedures to account for passengers with disabilities and elderly passengers, require training for airport staff on handling wheelchairs, and strengthen enforcement mechanisms to ensure that people with disabilities can fly.
“The FAA’s reauthorization is a true bipartisan victory for our entire economy, as well as a landmark improvement in aviation safety that will benefit air travelers and consumers across the nation,” Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement last week after the Senate passed the bill.
She called the bill “the most significant effort Congress has made in a decade to make flying safer, easier and more accessible for passengers with disabilities.”
Numerous policy disputes and regional disputes have delayed the bill’s approval. The bill, seen as one of the last bills to pass this Congress, had attracted dozens of other policy proposals that threatened to derail it, but those were rejected by the Senate last week.
The bill has sparked fierce local fighting over a provision that would add five new long-haul round-trip flights from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport outside Washington, D.C. — something long-pushed for by Delta Air Lines and lawmakers who rely heavily on the airport.
Four senators from Maryland and Virginia tried to block the changes, arguing that the airport maintains the nation’s busiest runway and cannot accommodate the additional flights.
They were the only Senate votes against the bill after the Commerce Committee’s top Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, blocked a vote on their proposal to give the transportation secretary the final say on adding new flights based on evaluations of safety and consumer experience.
The House passed the bill last summer but narrowly rejected a bipartisan proposal to add seven round-trip flights to Reagan National Airport. On Wednesday, several Washington-area lawmakers voted against the bill in protest of adding five round-trip flights.
“We should not accept backroom deals between senators simply to reflect special interests,” Rep. Donald S. Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, said on the House floor before the vote. “It’s painful that this measure is still in the bill despite broad bipartisan opposition. I cannot support a bill that hurts the constituents of my district, disrespects all of the elected leaders in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., and directly harms our airports and the passengers who travel there.”
After a dispute over whether to raise the retirement age for pilots to 67, the bill left it at 65. Supporters argued that doing so would ease a tight pilot workforce, but opponents from both parties argued that the bill would not solve the labor shortage and would raise a variety of logistical, legal and safety concerns because pilots over 65 are generally barred from international flights.
After a fight over changes to rules governing the type and amount of flight time pilots must accumulate to fly commercially, Congress also rejected attempts to add more simulated flight hours to the 1,500-hour requirement, maintaining the existing standard imposed after a plane crashed near Buffalo in 2009, killing everyone on board.