“We have great faith in our Senate champions but need to
see how the act plays out in the Senate over the next
few weeks,” Gaudet said, adding that he expects the
“number of House co-sponsors to rise dramatically by the
end of the month.” But the House bill is
missing the key endorsements of the House’s
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s top brass,
like aviation subcommittee heads Reps.Tom Petri (R-Wis.)
and Jerry Costello (D-Ill.), as well as Chairman John
Mica (R-Fla.) and ranking member Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.).
Mica has not yet offered a firm stance on the
legislation — and Costello and Petri are content to let
the FAA take the lead, for now.
“He and I both discussed the bill and we have not
co-sponsored the bill. And the reason that we haven’t is
that we want to let it play out,” Costello told POLITICO
of his analysis with Petri. The bill which
pits labor interests against business doesn’t stand much
of a chance of passing in a gridlocked legislature,
Costello said. But he did indicate that those interested
in ending the cargo carve-out might be pleased when the
FAA completes its review.
“They are going to take some action and those supportive
of the House bill, I suspect that they will be pleased
in the end,” Costello said. “I think the FAA will end up
taking action before” Congress. However, at
the time the cost-benefit review initially was
announced, an FAA spokeswoman told POLITICO that the
reason they were reviewing the analysis was because the
cost piece figures were on the low side. If that still
holds true, that means any potential revision would
likely be in favor of the original conclusion that
resulted in the carve-out.
In
any case, Cravaack and Bishop aren’t ceding anything to
the feds, instead meeting privately last week with
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and acting FAA
Administrator Michael Huerta to talk about fatigue
rules. Each side laid out the road ahead, but not in any
coordinated fashion. “Cravaack and I are
going to continue carrying forward with that even if the
department in effect reaffirms the exclusion,” Bishop
said of his legislation.
Cravaack, vice chairman of the aviation subcommittee,
said he was encouraged the Senate put out a sister bill
and even intimated that the tenuous surface
transportation conference could include his legislation,
though that would be an extremely heavy lift. (Beyond
the fact that the provision wasn’t included in either
chamber’s transportation bills, anything related to
aviation would reasonably be considered outside the
scope of the conference.) Costello also threw cold water
on that idea.
The Minnesota freshman said he has also requested to see
the FAA’s cost-benefit data that led to deciding the
rules would be too onerous to cargo pilots — and hasn’t
gotten his hands on it yet. Cravaack’s calls for “one
level of safety” aren’t doing much to convince the Cargo
Airline Association. “‘One level of safety’
is simply a sound bite, which doesn’t mean much
of anything. Because all segments of the industry
are slightly different and you can get to that level
differently,” Alterman said, explaining that cargo
pilots generally fly fewer hours than passenger pilots
to begin with. At big carriers like FedEx and UPS, the
pilots have access to “hotel-like” sleeping facilities,
Alterman added, and smaller carriers have access to some
form of rest areas, too.
Alterman also boasted of the cargo airline industry’s
sterling record, saying the National Transportation
Safety Board has only attributed two accidents or
incidents in the past 30 years to fatigue. “The
bottom line is in the last 10 years, we’ve flown over 8
million operations in the industry with absolutely no
fatigue-related incidents. None. And so I understand
what the unions are saying,” he said. “I understand what
their argument is. I just don’t think that there’s any
need to change the rules for our guys. We simply operate
differently.”
But to the UPS pilots, the carve-out is a “bad
idea,” plain and simple, Gaudet said. And to
continue the full-court press, which has already
included a thank-you advertisement for Snowe and
Boxer in Capitol Hill newspapers, the IPA is
planning to swarm the Hill next Thursday with pilots
meeting with 60 targeted lawmakers about ending the
cargo exemption.
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