President Donald Trump mocked the Federal Aviation Administration's overhaul of the air traffic control system on Thursday and pledged to rebuild the nation's airports without hiking costs for travelers.
The criticism of the FAA comes as some members of Congress and most of the major airlines push to spin off the air traffic control operation into a separate organization, and as FAA tries to implement the long-delayed NextGen system to modernize its aging technology.
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“I hear the government contracted for a system that’s the wrong system,” Trump told the White House gathering of airline and airport executives. “I hear we’re spending billions and billions of dollars. It’s a system that’s totally out of whack. It’s way over budget. It’s way behind schedule. And when it’s complete, it’s not going to be a good system. Other than that, it’s fantastic.”
And while Trump sounded a sympathetic note on a possible air traffic control overhaul, which U.S. airlines except for Delta support, participants at the meeting said he stopped short of backing the initiatives like the one pushed by lawmakers like House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.).
“We didn’t get a sense from the president that he was ready to jump on it, either,” said Kevin Burke, president and CEO of Airports Council International – North America.
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Trump, who once sought to launch his own airline and currently owns several aircraft, had fought a legal battle in Florida over the noisy jets flying over his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach. In 2015, the FAA yanked Trump’s name off some of its airborne navigation points over the Palm Beach area after he had made derogatory remarks about Mexican immigrants while launching his presidential campaign — at the time, the agency said it preferred “noncontroversial” labels for those waypoints.
At Thursday's meeting, Trump appeared to take a shot at FAA Administrator Michael Huerta, an Obama administration appointee whose term ends in 2018.
“I hear we have the wrong system. … And is the gentleman who’s the head of the FAA right now not a pilot?" Trump asked the executives. "I’d like to find out because I think it maybe would be good to have a pilot — like a really good pilot that knows what’s going on. ... I would think you need a very sophisticated person in that job."
Huerta is a former managing director of the 2002 Winter Olympics who also held positions at the ports in New York and San Francisco.
Airport executives said Trump seized on the amount of money that’s been earmarked so far for NextGen — the Government Accountability Office has pegged the figure at $7.4 billion through fiscal 2016 — and asked how long it would take to improve the air traffic control system and how much it would cost.
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“Clearly, this is a gentleman who’s done a lot of flying,” Burke said. “I’d call him an aviation aficionado.”
Among the attendees was Nick Calio, the president and CEO of Airlines for America, as well as executives from United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines.
“We are grateful to President Trump for hosting this meeting and were encouraged by his in-depth understanding of our industry and the need to reform our air traffic control system,” Calio said in a statement following the meeting. “We share his administration’s goals of growing jobs, reducing taxes and regulation, and expanding our economy.”
Neither Trump nor his new Transportation secretary Elaine Chao have said whether they favor the FAA breakup, which ran into resistance in both the House and the Senate during the Obama administration. Lawmakers must reauthorize the FAA's authority and funding stream by Sept. 30.
Trump didn’t delve into the specifics of where he would find the funding to overhaul aviation infrastructure — a figure airport executives have pegged at $100 billion over five years — but he dismissed the airports’ preferred source: hiking the passenger facility charge added to each airline ticket.
The current $4.50 charge assessed to passengers is “a lot,” Trump said. “There are other ways of doing this, because you’re only hurting yourself. Eventually people are just going to stop flying. It’s very expensive with all the taxes. I mean, there are other ways.”
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“Don’t worry about the money,” he added. “I’ll be able to get the money. The money — we’re going to change things around.”
Trump also seemed to acknowledged the criticisms made by some U.S. airlines of the state-run Middle Eastern carriers Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways. The U.S. airlines have asserted that the Gulf competitors receive government support that’s given them an unfair advantage and breaches Open Skies agreements.
But Trump said those foreign airlines also benefit the U.S. economy.
“I know you’re under pressure from a lot of foreign elements and foreign carriers. I’ve been hearing that a little bit,” Trump said at the start of the discussion. “At the same time, we want to make life good for them, also. They come with big investments. In many cases, those investments are made by their governments. But they are still big investments.”
But the president said he has heard the complaints of U.S. carriers.
“Probably about one hour after I got elected, I was inundated with calls from your industry and many other industries because, you know, it’s a pretty unfair situation,” Trump said.
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Pilot unions’ battle against an Obama administration decision allowing cut-rate carrier Norwegian Air International to conduct trans-Atlantic flights didn’t come up during the meeting, airport officials said. Neither did Trump’s executive order temporarily prohibiting citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries from traveling to the United States — a move that spurred protests and sowed confusion among foreign travelers at airports nationwide in the immediate aftermath.
Trump directed his staff to arrange a follow-up meeting with aviation industry representatives in two-and-a-half to three months. Airport officials said former DOT counsel DJ Gribbin attended the meeting and is the special assistant to the president for infrastructure.
Bill Vanecek, director of aviation at Buffalo Niagara International Airport, said their goal then will be to narrow the policy options on how and when to move forward with an aviation-specific infrastructure plan.
In the meantime, Trump is promising that the sector will like where he goes on infrastructure.
“We have an obsolete plane system. We have obsolete airports,” Trump said. “We have obsolete trains. We have bad roads. We’re going to change all of that, folks. You’re going to be so happy with Trump. I think you already are.”
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
