President Donald Trump has compiled a short list of nominees
to head the FAA, including his personal pilot, according to Axios.
The news website on Sunday reported that John Dunkin, who has
been Trump's pilot for decades and handled his aviation during the 2016
campaign, is on the list. Axios cited an administration official as noting that
Dunkin's experience extends beyond being a pilot to managing "airline and
corporate flight departments [and] certified airlines from start-up under FAA
regulations."
FAA administrator Michael Huerta, a President Barack Obama appointee
who took the position in January 2013, stepped down when his term expired at
the beginning of this year. Huerta oversaw one of the safest periods in U.S.
aviation history, during which no U.S. commercial carriers had any passenger
fatalities.
In a meeting
with airline executives last year, Trump mentioned his pilot, though not by
name, as a good choice to lead the FAA, particularly in air traffic control
modernization. "I just think a non-pilot would not know the sophistication
of the system, right?" Trump said at the meeting. "Better to have a
pilot because my pilot said it's a terrible system that they're installing,
that the work they’re doing now is a waste of tremendous amounts of money
because the system is a bad system."
Other nominees under consideration, according to Axios,
include:
- Daniel Elwell, who joined the FAA as deputy
administrator last June and has served as acting administrator since Huerta's
term ended. An American Airlines pilot for 16 years, he also served as senior
aviation advisor to Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and was SVP for
safety, security and operations at Airlines for America from 2013 to 2015.
-
Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican in the U.S.
House of Representatives and chair of the House subcommittee on highways and transit.
Graves is a pilot, co-chairs the House General Aviation Caucus and supports the
Trump-backed
plan to decouple the air traffic control system from the FAA, putting it
into the hands of a nonprofit corporation.