Pilots are speaking out against the Federal Aviation Administration’s latest priorities surrounding social justice.
The pilots spoke with Fox News after the 2023 budget from the administration revealed spending for “environmental justice” and “an additional $20 million above the 2021 enacted level for the office of the secretary to lead [Department of Transportation] DOT’s efforts to promote equity and inclusion.”
It also comes after system failures resulted in all flights being grounded on Wednesday for the first time since 9/11.
Sal Lagonia, an aviation lawyer, told the outlet the spending on “non-essential issues within the agency does nothing to help these technological blunders.”
He also commented on the change to the “Notice to Airman” (NOTAM) acronym to “Notice to Air Missions.”
Lagonia explained, “Just look at the change as to what NOTAM stands for. It has been ‘Notices to Airman’ for many years. Recently, the agency spent a great deal of money and effort to take the word ‘man’ out of the title and instead call it ‘Notices to Air Missions.'”
He added, “Documents had to be changed, to the new name, etc. Spend that effort and money on bolstering the systems that makes and keeps flying safe.”
JP Tristiani, an aviation expert, veteran and pilot, called the agenda “ridiculous,” adding, “Neither the DOT nor FAA should be involved with being a social ‘petri dish’ investing in such nonsense.”
He suggested Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is “responsible, and accountable for the oversight of the FAA.”
Commenting on the administration’s investment in climate change, Tristiani told Fox News, “My interest was/remains, the safety of my aircraft, my training and that of my copilot, the route I’m flying and the only ‘climate change’ I am interested in is the weather along the route.”
It was reported that a corrupted file was the cause of the breakdown, according to a senior government official.
“The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage,” the agency said in a statement.
The statement continues, “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack.”
Buttigieg told NBC News one of the questions “we need to look at right now, and one of the things I’m asking from FAA, is what’s the state of the art in this form of message traffic?”
He continued, “And again, how is it possible for there to be this level of disruption?”