With help from Tanya Snyder
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— Boeing’s CEO will face two congressional committees this week, and lawmakers are impatient for answers about the company’s safety culture and its role in the deaths of 346 people in Boeing 737 MAX crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia.
— The House could vote this week on a bill aimed at ensuring revenue from the harbor maintenance tax is spent solely on its intended purpose.
— The resignation of freshman Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) could pave the way for legislation banning transit agencies from buying buses from companies backed by the Chinese government.
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BOEING’S CONGRESSIONAL CRUCIBLE: It’s a big week for Boeing, the FAA and transportation-focused lawmakers and staff. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg will testify at two hearings, one on Tuesday in the Senate Commerce Committee and the other on Wednesday in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He has plenty to answer for. Since the two 737 MAX crashes, a steady stream of investigations and news reports have found faults with Boeing’s safety culture and flaws in the FAA’s certification process.
Several members of Congress have said that the opportunity to question Muilenburg will shape how they approach their role in preventing future crashes. But two Democratic senators have decided not to wait to hear more. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) are introducing a bill that would codify recommendations from the NTSB regarding how pilots respond to alerts from automated systems. It would also require the FAA to comply with the DOT inspector general’s 2016 recommendations that the agency require manufacturers to have “safety management systems.”
The MAX could fly again as early as this year even amid the political and PR firestorm, our Brianna Gurciullo reports with an assist from your host. The FAA has said it’s hit several key milestones in testing Boeing’s modifications to the plane, and airlines are planning to start phasing it back into their fleets early next year. But Boeing will also have to earn the trust of the flying public, and continued scrutiny from Congress and regulators will keep making that task harder. “This took years to get in this ditch, and it’s going to take some considerable amount of time for both the FAA and Boeing to get out of this ditch,” veteran pilot and safety consultant John Cox told POLITICO.
Indonesian investigators released a final report Friday on the October 2018 Lion Air crash. It details how problems with Boeing’s design, the airline’s maintenance and pilot training led to the plane crashing into the Java Sea.
The FAA has also revoked the certificate of a Florida company’s repair station, following a report that found the company had likely miscalibrated a sensor on the MAX jet that crashed in Indonesia, Brianna reports. Xtra Aerospace “failed to comply with requirements to repair only aircraft parts on its list of parts acceptable to the FAA that it was capable of repairing,” the aviation regulator said in a statement.
Also happening this week on the Hill: a House Homeland Security Committee hearing looking at implementation of the TSA reauthorization passed last year. Acting TSA Deputy Administrator Patricia Cogswell and the Government Accountability Office’s William Russell will testify.
And the House could vote on H.R. 2440 (116), legislation which would ensure that revenue from the harbor maintenance tax is spent entirely on its intended purpose and would prevent a portion of the funds from being diverted to other areas of the federal budget. The bill, by House Transportation Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), was approved by his committee in May with only opposition from Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who said it would be an “irresponsible” increase in non-defense spending.
DEBATE GOES ON OVER HELI TRAVEL IN MANHATTAN: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio stopped short of endorsing legislation proposed by three New York members of Congress that would ban all tourist and ride-sharing trips in helicopters over Manhattan. But he did say, as POLITICO New York’s Joe Anuta reports, that he wants to ban non-essential trips. “The most important thing to me is to get away from airspace over Manhattan, but again I want to reduce overall helicopter activity in New York City,” de Blasio said. The legislative push by Democratic Reps. Carolyn Maloney, Jerry Nadler and Nydia Velázquez was sparked by a June helicopter crash on the top of a Manhattan skyscraper.
BYD LOSES PRIMARY CONGRESSIONAL ALLY: Hill is resigning from Congress as soon as this week — and with her goes the key barrier to a provision that would ban transit agencies from buying buses from companies backed by the Chinese government. The only bus company that would be affected by the measure is BYD, which employs about 750 people at a factory just outside of Hill’s district. Hill had emerged as BYD’s primary ally on the Hill and had rallied other Democrats to support her, seeing protection of those jobs as key to her ability to retain the previously Republican seat that she flipped in 2018.
With her departure, Democrats now have little reason to oppose the BYD ban, which many lawmakers see as important to U.S. national and economic security. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who went to bat for BYD while the Republicans held the majority, has largely sat out this round. The measure is attached to the Senate version of the defense authorization bill, but the House bill did not include buses, thanks to Hill’s advocacy. The two are currently being reconciled in conference.
IS THE STB OBSOLETE? The Surface Transportation Board should be folded into DOT, reducing the opportunities for regulatory capture, a scholar at the right-leaning AEI wrote in a new report published Friday. In the paper, Roslyn Layton argued that the STB (along with the FCC) meets the four criteria for agency obsolescence developed by Yale Law School professor Jonathan Macey. Layton argues that the STB is engaged in turf-grabbing, has been captured by interest groups, gives a distorted flow of information to the public and responds to manufactured crises — namely, that the agency regulates prices in the rail industry despite claiming that sector has vibrant competition.
AMTRAK WILL BUILD YOU A RAILROAD TRACK — and won’t even make sure you reimburse it, according to a new report from Amtrak’s inspector general’s office. The internal watchdog looked into Amtrak’s business practices for reimbursable projects, like installing tracks or positive train control, for state DOTs or freight railroads and found that Amtrak doesn’t “effectively and consistently manage” these projects. Amtrak doesn’t require a business case to be made that defines costs and benefits and officials don’t always conduct partner relationships successfully. And a lack of project management controls means that of the three projects the OIG looked at, two of them overspent by $10.4 million combined — costs the corporation won’t recover.
— “Before deadly crashes, Boeing pushed for law that undercut oversight.” New York Times.
— “Lawsuit: Southwest pilots streamed video from bathroom cam.” Associated Press.
— “From shipping channels to fashion runways.” Wall Street Journal.
— “U.S. stops flights to all Cuban cities except Havana.” Washington Post.
— “An Ohio factory closure stirs populist anger. Who will that help in 2020?” Boston Globe.
— “The Canal of Death is now an economic gateway for Eastern Europe.” Bloomberg.
DOT appropriations run out in 25 days. The FAA reauthorization expires in 1,434 days. Highway and transit policy is up for renewal in 339 days.
