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Oral Testimony:
Chairman LoBiondo, Ranking Member Larsen, and Members of the Subcommittee: A year ago, Congress reauthorized the Federal Aviation Administration after four and a half years of uncertainty and stop-gap measures. The biggest benefit of reauthorization was that it would provide predictability and allow us to invest with greater certainty in the future. So were grateful for your effort on this, and we have been working very diligently in the past year to implement the provisions of reauthorization.
Safety
As we move forward, the number one mission of the FAA is safety. That will always be our priority.
In the last few years, Congress has given us much guidance on how to advance aviation safety. And we have accomplished a great deal. The FAA overhauled flight and duty rules to guarantee that airline pilots have the opportunity to get the rest they need to operate safely. And we are raising the required number of hours of experience before a pilot can operate the controls of any airline flight. We are also finalizing a rule that will require more rigorous and training so that flight crews can better handle rare but serious scenarios.
We are also improving our safety culture at the FAA and throughout the industry by voluntarily reporting hazards before they become a problem, and by adopting safety management systems. Internally, we created the Aviation Safety Whistleblower Investigation Office. One of the cornerstones of our safety culture is to ensure that employees can provide information without fear of reprisal.
Technology
While we are enhancing the safety of the system that we know today, we are also working to deliver the benefits of new technology to create the aviation system of tomorrow, through NextGen.
We are working to safely integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems into our airspace. Earlier this year as directed by Congress in the reauthorization we requested proposals to host six sites across the country to test unmanned aircraft systems. This is a matter of significant public interest. We need to better understand operational issues to safely integrate these aircraft into our airspace. We need to explore pilot training and make sure that unmanned aircraft sense and avoid other aircraft. And, if they lose the link to their ground-based pilot, these aircraft need to operate safely.
Collaboration
If we are going to continue to move aviation forward, and remain a world leader, we need to collaborate across the FAA, as well as with other government agencies, and also with industry. Reauthorization asked us to do this, and we have made great strides in collaborative efforts.
Chairman LoBiondo, as you know, Atlantic City is a leader in NextGen research. The William J. Hughes Technical Center plays a key role in fostering NextGen, and we appreciate your support.
We have worked with our labor unions, industry, airports and others to address the problem of congested airspace over busy metropolitan areas. We are producing satellite-based procedures much more quickly. And were using these NextGen procedures right now to reduce the miles that aircraft must fly; to create more direct routes, cut delays; and to reduce fuel burn and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
We are pleased that the President has announced his intent to appoint Michael Whitaker as Deputy Administrator of the FAA. Mr. Whitaker is a veteran of the airline industry and would serve as the FAAs Chief NextGen Officer, responsible for fostering the transformation of our nations airspace.
The FAA has an initial set of NextGen metrics available on our website, and we expect to publish additional performance metrics in the coming months. Our NextGen Performance Snapshots show that NextGen is happening now.
For example in Chicago, we have been able to reduce delays at OHare International Airport in bad weather thanks to NextGen. OHare and nearby Midway International have overlapping airspace at times. We made better use of this congested airspace in the past two years with a satellite-based procedure that aircraft use when flying into Midway. This procedure has allowed OHare to improve its arrival rate by eight to 12 aircraft per hour when its rainy or foggy and the ceilings are low. And aircraft flying into Midway travel fewer miles and save fuel. This is one of the many positive effects of NextGen and the type of improvement that reauthorization supports.
The reauthorization laid out a vision to address the future needs of our nations aviation system. And these needs have not gone away. Its important for us to work together to protect the great contribution that civil aviation makes to our economy of $1.3 trillion and 10 million jobs.
As you know, we are again facing fiscal uncertainty and unpredictability. The sequester is requiring the FAA to make sizeable budget cuts that affect our operations and our future. While we are grateful that Congress found a temporary solution to the FAA furloughs, this stop-gap measure does not end the sequester.
We will not enjoy the benefits or the stability that reauthorization provides until we end the sequester and find a sensible long-term solution.
I sincerely hope that we can work together to ensure that America continues to operate the safest and most efficient aviation system in the world.
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my prepared remarks. I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
Aereo CEO says he’s boosted by winning a round in court—and that “lines are very, very long” for his Internet TV offering, despite ABC’s new competing streaming service.
The legal battles are not over for Internet TV startup Aereo. But for now CEO Chet Kanojia, whom I had a chance to interview yesterday, says things couldn’t be better—with “very, very long” lines in markets across the United States for his streaming local TV service that has the broadcast industry in full battle cry.
Composite and 3-D-printed components will mean jet engines that use 15 percent less fuel.
A new generation of engines being developed by the world’s largest jet engine maker, CFM (a partnership between GE and Snecma of France), will allow aircraft to use about 15 percent less fuel—enough to save about $1 million per year per airplane and significantly reduce carbon emissions.
Micro-display LED tech could light up the next generation of face-wearable gadgets.
A tiny head-mounted display, like the one in Google Glass, will only be useful if you can see on-screen alerts and information clearly. And that’s tricky to achieve, especially without draining battery life—as Google notes, it can be hard to use Glass’s projected display in bright sunlight.
The same researchers who mapped racist Tweets about President Obama have made a Tweet-based map of hate in the United States. But there’s reason to be a little skeptical.
Researchers have created a “hate map” that splashes a U.S. map with color-coding showing the proportion of all Tweets that contain common hateful words about race, sexual orientation, or disabilities.
We’ve hit 400 ppm of carbon dioxide, but we won’t know what that means for decades.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography say that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere hit the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million yesterday, up from about 280, the level it was at for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.
Alberta will serve as a test bed for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration.
Canada is betting that carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is fairly well understood but unproven at the scale needed to significantly decrease greenhouse gas emissions, can reduce the environmental footprint associated with making fuel from oil sands—its fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions. (See “Alberta’s Oil Sands Heat Up.”)
Artificial retinas give the blind only the barest sense of what’s visible, but researchers are working hard to improve that.
Elias Konstantopoulos gets spotty glimpses of the world each day for about four hours, or for however long he leaves his Argus II retina prosthesis turned on. The 74-year-old Maryland resident lost his sight from a progressive retinal disease over 30 years ago, but is able to perceive some things when he turns on the bionic vision system.
A Department of Defense report says that China’s military is infiltrating, and could attack, U.S. government computer networks.
For years now security companies have described that attacks originating in China routinely infiltrate and steal data from U.S. corporate networks, and that similar activity targets U.S. government systems, too. But even as politicians and government officials have begun to speak more freely about the issue (see “U.S. Power Grids, Water Plants a Hacking Target”), they have stopped short of making specific accusations about who is responsible. In April, President Obama’s national security adviser Tom Donilon talked vaguely of attacks “emanating from China.”
Platforms that combine networking with user interfaces will help companies test post-PC ideas.
Why should only computers, smartphones, and tablets be able to send a tweet? In the hopes of challenging this idea, Twitter recently developed a whimsical tweet-enabled cuckoo clock. It uses a toolkit that could help other designers and engineers test ways for new products to contribute to, and feed on, the social network’s chatter. Twitter created the clock, called #Flock, last month in partnership with London-based technology consultancy Berg; the clock responds to incoming tweets, @-messages, and retweets by animating small wooden puppets.
The planet’s rising atmospheric CO2 levels may hit a symbolic milestone this month.
This May, the folks behind a Twitter account started four months ago are preparing to tweet an event that the planet has not seen in an estimated four million years.
