FAA head defends safety of US air travel after close calls

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday the agency has taken steps to avoid a repeat of the technology failure last month that briefly halted all flights nationwide, but he said he couldn't promise there won't be another breakdown.

Separately, acting FAA administrator Billy Nolen defended the safety of airline travel in the United States after recent incidents at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, in Austin, Texas, and off the coast of Hawaii.

Still, Nolen said, he is putting together a team of experts to review airline safety.

“We are experiencing the safest period in aviation history, but we do not take that for granted,” Nolen said during testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee.

“Recent events remind us that we cannot become complacent.”

The committee's hearing was billed as an examination of the failure of an FAA system that provides safety alerts to pilots, but lawmakers were most animated when they quizzed Nolen on the recent flight scares.

Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, showed a video re-enactment of the February 4 Austin incident in which a FedEx cargo plane flew over the top of a departing Southwest Airlines flight.

Both planes had been cleared to use the same runway.

The FedEx pilots aborted their landing just in time to avoid a collision.

The breakdown of the FAA system of distributing alerts called NOTAMs to pilots began late on January 10 when contractors accidentally deleted files, corrupting the main database and a backup, he said.

Attempts to fix the problem by the next morning failed, and FAA barred all planes from taking off for nearly two hours on January 11, leading to 1,300 cancelled flights and 11,000 delays.

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