House T&I Committee Hearing on April 19, 2023

I am actually looking forward to tomorrow's Reauthorization hearing before the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The subject of the hearing: FAA Reauthorization: Examining the Current and Future Challenges Facing the Aerospace Workforce.

The invited witnesses will represent the Regional Airlines Association (#raa), Airline Pilots Association (#alpa), Government Accountability Office (#gao), Flight Safety International and Vaughn College. Chairman Graves committee seems to be focusing on many of the right things. For me, the discussion on Air Traffic Control (ATC) on March 23, 2023, was necessary and hopefully shed some light on a foundational issue that impacts the customer experience.

Undoubtedly, RAA v. ALPA, will be in full disagreement on the issue of pilot training. Flight Safety has its perspective on the issue. In a previous post I talked about things important to me that are foundational. One of them was to "mandate ALPA meet and confer on pilot training rather than deflect and distort in the name of safety". The families of the Colgan victims are already spooling up.

I am assuming that GAO will talk about small community air service as part of their testimony. There will be numbers tossed around regarding service loss that just do not reflect a changing industry. Ultimately, the Reauthorization process comes down to money. Wishful thinking would have money follow the demands of the system, so I throw this out as context:

There are 387 commercial airports that are defined by the FAA as large hub, medium hub, small hub, and nonhub primary airports.
- 7.8% are large hub airports = 60.6% of passengers and 60.2% of revenue;
- 9.0% are medium hub airports = 22.9% of passengers and 22.4% of revenue;
- 20.7% are small hub airports = 12.8% of passengers and 13.0% of revenue.

Much of the conversation around small community air service then is really about 62.5% of commercial air service airports, or 242, that generate 3.7% of local origin and destination passengers and 4.4% of revenue.

We will make available research to our clients today that shows clearly that the state of competition/consumer choice in city pairs at the FAA's three largest airport classifications has not been degraded at all during the Pandemic Era. Even I was surprised. Yep, 145 airports that generate 95+% of traffic and revenue most often have at least as much/more choice among airline sector products as they did in March 2020.

It is no longer fair to combine nonhub city pairs with the others and arrive at some determination of competition and choice. Passengers from the 242 smaller airports are likely driving to the 145 larger airports because of competition between airline sectors and the fact that the consumer has choice about what sector to use to get to their final destination.

The competition has always been concentrated.

Shouldn't this be about: FOLLOW THE MONEY?