Ciscomani Questions Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy about Aviation Security

Ciscomani questioned Secretary Duffy about provisions in the Department’s proposed budget that would prevent tragic incidents, like the deadly mid-air collision at the Marana Regional Airport, from happening again.  

 

For the full clip and excerpts of the hearing, please see below. Excerpts have been edited for length and clarity. 

 

Ciscomani questions Secretary Duffy 

 

Ciscomani:  On February 19 of this year, two small aircraft crashed midair resulting in the death of two individuals in Marana, Arizona. It is critical that the federal government works to ensure that something like this never occurs again…[Could you] provide an update on how your budget proposal will ensure [that] incidents like this do not occur again, especially in smaller rural airports that are regional and [have] less resources? 

 

Secretary Duffy: That was tragic. This was in an uncontrolled airspace, so controllers don't control every aspect of the airspace. A lot of the small airports… oftentimes it’s done by pilots and visually staying away from each other. And by the way, I don't think general aviation would like air traffic controllers to control every aspect of the airspace. They do like the freedom of movement, but it then creates risks, like we saw in your community, where two planes collided midair…It’s the infrastructure and it's the manpower of air traffic controllers. And this is what we've been talking about. And we want to work with all of you to pressure test the numbers that we're thinking about. This can be very dangerous and a lot of the pilots who fly commercially take people's lives in their hands, and it is a serious business, and we want to make sure that all of them are taking it that way. Another thing that we need in that in part of rural America, we got to think through how we're building out the infrastructure of towers and Terminal Radar Approach Control Facilities (TRACONs). I think on average we build one a year. It's going to take us 400 years to replace all of the towers and TRACONs in this country. We want to [improve] that. We'd like to do four or five a year, I mean up the speed to update the old infrastructure. And a lot of you have those facilities around your districts that need work… If we could start the process every year, getting four or five of them done, I think we would be well on the way.  

 

Watch Ciscomani’s entire round of questioning here.