The Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee has approved a five-year FAA reauthorization bill, ending a long delay.
The measure passed by unanimous consent and will next move to a vote by the full Senate.
The House passed its version of FAA reauthorization in June ahead of an initial deadline of Sept. 30 for the bill to be passed and signed by President Biden. But since October the FAA has been operating on short-term funding authorizations, the most recent of which lasts through March.
What the Senate's bill contains
The Senate's wide-ranging reauthorization bill contains measures designed to increase aviation safety, address the shortage of air traffic controllers, introduce some consumer protections, increase air travel accessibility and modernize airports.
One safety measure would increase the required retention time for cockpit recordings to 25 hours, up from two hours. That change, which has also been proposed by the FAA, comes after the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines flight in which the exit door plug blew out: The two-hour retention time wasn't sufficient for National Transportation Safety Board investigators to access the cockpit recording.
Also on the safety front, the bill would enable the FAA to hire more aircraft manufacturing safety inspectors annually.
On the consumer front, the bill would require airlines to make refunds available for domestic flights that are delayed more than three hours and international flights that are delayed more than six hours. It would forbid airlines from charging fees for families to sit together. It would mandate airlines to accept vouchers and flight credits for at least five years. And it would require airlines to display certain ancillary fees, such a bag fees, prior to booking.
Among the air travel accessibility measures in the bill is one that requires training for airline personnel on safely storing wheelchairs in hopes of reducing the number of damaged wheelchairs.
For airports, the bill would increase annual Airport Improvement Program funding over the next five year, from $3.35 billion to $4 billion.
And on the air traffic control front, the bill proposes the creation of an FAA training academy.
Where are ASTA's requests?
The Senate committee's long-delayed movement on FAA reauthorization Thursday drew praise from various lobbying organizations, along with calls for quick passage by the full Senate and quick action for a final bill by a joint conference committee.
"It's critical that the House and Senate move quickly to conference their bills and send a final package to the president's desk," said U.S. Travel Association executive vice president of public affairs and policy Tori Emerson Barnes.
ASTA called for the Senate to add a series of travel advisor-friendly measures to the bill, which are already in the House version. In particular, the Society wants a provision that would make it clear that a travel agency's obligation to issue a refund to a client is limited to when the travel agency possesses the funds, as opposed to the airline.
ASTA is also pushing for a measure requiring the DOT to create a streamlined system for fulfilling consumer disclosure requirements in offline transactions. And it would like a travel agency seat added to the DOT's Aviation Consumer Protection Advisory Committee.
Those measures, although in the House bill, did not make it into the Senate version, but they still could be added before the full Senate vote or during conference.
A controversial amendment to reduce flight hours
Thursday's transportation committee FAA reauthorization session came nearly eight months after a previously scheduled session was canceled at the eleventh hour by committee chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) over a dispute about pilot training requirements.
An amendment authored by Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota and Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, would have authorized the FAA to establish tailored training pathways that could reduce by 250 the number of flight hours certain aspiring pilots must accrue to crew a commercial flight.
Supporters argued that the amendment would help ease the U.S. airline pilot shortage and improve pilot training, but it met fierce opposition from Democrats who argued that it would diminish safety.
The bill that passed out of the transportation committee Thursday included an adjustment to the Thune-Sinema amendment, which doesn't reduce pilot training hours but still enables tailored training pathways.
During the relatively brief hearing on Thursday, the one voice vote the committee took also concerned pilot training. The amendment would have raised the mandatory retirement age for commercial airline pilots from 65 to 67, but it was defeated by Democrats on a 14-13 party line vote. The House FAA reauthorization bill still contains that provision.
This report was updated to add more details about the status of ASTA's requests for the reauthorization bill language.