Hearings? Form a task force...

There must be a big hearing coming up...You can always tell when the FAA is about to take a big hit in Congress: it announces a major inspection or a task force. That's the case with the latest from the FAA's new guy, the very capable Randy Babbitt, who came out the day before a series of congressional hearings on commuter airline safety with word that the agency will launch a series of (one guess, no more, ladies and gentlemen) commuter airlines.
The aviation agency will focus on pilot training, and the agency will also call in regionals, pilot groups and majors for a closed-door meeting early next week to seek ways to boost safety immediately. But given the impetus - the nation's worst airline disaster since late 2001, the February crash of a Continental Connection turboprop at Buffalo in February - it's not likely that critics will be satisfied. And North Dakota's Byron Dorgan, who heads the Senate aviation subcommittee, is unlikely to give the regulators a pass. Remember, his state is served almost exclusively by regional carriers.

Tit for MRO Tat

It's begun. The reaction was slow, perhaps, but inevitable, and as the Democratic Congress under a Democratic administration moved to enact its pro-American, pro-labor, protectionist agenda, a reaction was inevitable. Now it has come from the other side of the Atlantic. John Bruton, the European Union's ambassador to the US, said in Brussels that the FAA bill passed last week by the House has "language which would negate the Open Skies agreement," the landmark pact meant to open transatlantic skies (eventually).
The measure orders FAA inspectors to do a check of any non-US maintenance and repair shop that handles US-based and US-flagged airliners. The FAA would have to perform inspections twice a year, and some 400 MRO shops in Europe would be targeted, along with the measure's real target, shops in Central and Latin America.
Bruton said that if Europe made a strict retaliatory move, some 1,200 maintenance shops in the US would be targeted for inspection by European safety authorities. That, said Bruton, a former Irish prime minister, could cost both sides millions. Bruton said that he would work to persuade the Senate to remove this foreign inspection-station measure, but that "the protectionist platforms" on which many elections to Congress were based made this a challenging task.

Maybe this year for a flyers' rights bill

Maybe next year. That's what Kate Hanni has been saying for a long time, ever since she was stranded on an airliner stuck for about nine hours on a runway in Austin back in 2006. After that she began a push for an airline passenger bill of rights with a surprisingly well organized lobbying and grass roots group. Well, her year may have come. The House last night passed an FAA bill that contains the kind of language her Flyers Rights group has been pushing. The House, though, was always the easy part because the lower chamber has been receptive to the bill of rights, passing a version last year, although it went nowhere in the Senate. The airlines' promise of voluntary pledges of better service won the day in the upper chamber. But the Senate this year is a very different place than it was a year ago, with a Democratic majority that has a pretty much veto-proof balance of power. Not that there's a likely veto. After all, as Hanni notes, a senator named Obama supported the passenger bill of rights last year, and he's now in the White House.