Politicians at work

While driving into Bethesda from the Gaithersburg airport on Friday, we turned on the radio and found ourselves listening to a U.S. Senate hearing. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) was grilling Robert Sturgell, the FAA acting administrator, and Mary Peters, head of the Department of Transportation. Stevens was angry that Peters had not asked for more subsidies for airline travel to small towns. Alaska was receiving more than 30 percent of all these funds and they had just been cut. It upset Stevens that someone living in Kotzebue or Barrow would pay more for an airline ticket than someone who had chosen to live in Dallas or Denver.

Stevens’s next harangued Peters and Sturgell for the FAA’s lack of response to a 15-year-old girl having met a guy on the Internet and purchased an airline ticket out of Juneau to North Carolina. Stevens said that as a father and a grandfather, he was outraged that teenagers could simply buy plane tickets and fly around. Peters concurred, saying that she was a mother and a grandmother, and that flying teenagers were a bad thing for all concerned.

Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) attacked the FAA guy for failing to respond to controllers’ complaints about some new departure procedures out of Newark. A departure procedure is a set of line segments on a map with some default altitudes to fly on each segment. Sturgell said that the procedures had cost $50 million and 10 years to develop, which included hiring a lot of consultants and getting input from the controllers. They argued over whether the new procedures put airplanes out of Newark closer or farther away from LaGuardia traffic. Nobody asked why it should cost $50 million to draw a few lines on a map…