Airlines and airports are not perfectly aligned on major issues that confront the U.S. aviation industry, but representatives of both segments found reason to be encouraged after a February 9 meeting with President Donald Trump. Less comforted in the meeting’s aftermath was the Federal Aviation Administration—the agency responsible for a system that Trump described in public remarks as ill-equipped and badly managed.
Among those attending the breakfast meeting and listening session at the White House were the CEOs of Airlines for America (A4A)-member carriers Alaska Air Group, Atlas Air, FedEx, JetBlue, Southwest, United and UPS, plus non-member Delta Air Lines. Attending under the umbrella of Airports Council International-North America (ACI-NA) were top executives of the Buffalo Niagara and Tampa international airports, the Chicago Department of Aviation, Los Angeles World Airports, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a White House senior advisor, and Gary Cohn, formerly the president of Goldman Sachs and now director of the National Economic Council, participated in the meeting.

According to a media pool report from the start of the meeting: “POTUS (the President of the United States) congratulated airlines at succeeding ‘despite the bad equipment that the airport gives you, in many cases. I have a pilot who’s a real expert,’ POTUS said, noting that his pilot has said airlines are often provided with ‘the wrong stuff…And we have an obsolete plane system, we have obsolete airports.’”

Without naming it, the president criticized the FAA’s multifaceted NextGen effort to modernize the ATC system, which was founded in legislation passed in 2003, and asserted that a pilot should run the agency. FAA Administrator Michael Huerta, a non-pilot with an extensive transportation industry resume, came to the FAA in June 2010 as deputy administrator. President Obama promoted him to administrator after Randy Babbitt, a former airline pilot and labor leader, resigned from the position over a drunken driving charge that a judge later dismissed. The Senate confirmed Huerta for a five-year term as administrator in January 2013.

At the White House meeting, “Southwest spoke first and said the top priority for helping airlines would be to ‘modernize the air traffic control system,’ noting that money spent on the system has not helped improve it in the past,” the pool report stated. “‘I hear we're spending billions and billions of dollars; it’s a system that’s totally out of whack,” POTUS said of the air traffic control system. POTUS inquired as to why airline corporations had allowed the government to invest in a faulty system. Southwest informed POTUS that the airlines are not ‘in control’ of those decisions.”