Bill Would Prohibit Sec. of Transportation Pete Buttigieg from Using Private Air Travel
Development comes after investigations most recent air fiasco is blamed on a lone contractor with corrupt software file, the latest crisis for Biden’s private-jet addicted DOT head.
A lone contractor with a corrupt software file is being blamed for the latest airline fiasco. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all domestic flights for several hours due to an outage in a critical safety system.
The outage on Wednesday morning affected the agency’s antiquated Notice to Air Missions system, known as NOTAM. The 30-year-old system provides advance warnings to pilots and flight crews about hazards such as inclement weather and runway closures.
On Wednesday, the agency blamed the outage on “a damaged database file” and by Thursday evening said the file “was damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures.” The agency has not said whether the incident happened due to human error or malice.
“We need to make sure that there are enough safeguards built into the system that this level of disruption can’t happen because of an individual person’s decision or action or mistake,” Transportation Pete Buttigieg told NBC Nightly News, which reported that at least one of eight contractors with access to the NOTAM system edited the corrupt datafile.
This incident follows on the heels of the Southwest Airlines collapse that resulted in massive disruptions to holiday travel. Shareholders are now suing the airline, claiming that problems its software system were concealed by the company.
Shareholders filed a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines Co (LUV.N) on Thursday, accusing the carrier of fraudulently concealing problems that led last month to an operational meltdown and more than 15,000 flight cancellations.
According to the proposed class action filed in federal court in Houston, Southwest publicly downplayed or failed to disclose serious shortcomings in its flight scheduling software technology.
The lawsuit said Southwest also did not discuss how its “point-to-point” route structure, which differs from the “hub-and-spoke” structure at other large U.S. airlines, could leave it vulnerable to unexpected bad weather.
Given how reliant our transportation system is on functional software, these developments are chilling. However, it is perhaps also useful to look at how “diversity hires” may be adversely impacting the system.
Perhaps the most prominent of these diversity hires is Biden’s pick for Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. The last time we checked in on him, records indicated that has flown on taxpayer-funded private jets at least 18 times since 2021 after pushing for clean energy transportation options.
New reports also indicate that Buttigieg recently used a taxpayer-funded plane to fly between New York City and Washington D.C. only to return a few hours later.
According to a Freedom of Information Act request filed on behalf of Americans for Public Trust, Buttigieg flew in early April on a jet operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that reportedly cost taxpayers only $228.
However, according to figures from Energy Information Administration, a federal agency, cited by Americans for Public Trust, the fuel alone for such a flight is estimated to be $1,060.
“As the self-described ‘second biggest fan of rail in the administration’ only behind the President, it’s laughable Secretary Buttigieg flew private to New York City to meet with the head of a liberal dark money group instead of taking Amtrak,” Caitlin Sutherland, the Executive Director of Americans for Public Trust, remarked in a statement.
As a result of these ill-considered decisions, South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R) filed a bill entitled Commercial Cabins for Cabinet Members that “would require the Secretary of Transportation to only fly commercial” until the chaos is resolved.
“If according to Sec. Buttigieg, on MSNBC earlier today, the FAA systems are constantly being updated, and if they’re so good, then why is he flying private all the time?” said Rep. Mace. “Until we see the Southwest Airlines debacle investigated; until the FAA software glitches are fixed; and until we complete the FAA reauthorization later this year, the Secretary of Transportation should be required to fly commercial just like everyone else.”
As a reminder, Buttigieg launched a new billion dollar program to address racial equity in roads. He proposed to resolve the airline employee shortage crisis by forcing airlines to hire more employees. He disappeared on paternity leave while a potentially economy-devastating rail strike threat loomed.
Buttigieg is a spectacular blend of hapless incompetence and destructive wokeness. It is good to see Congress attempting to rein-in some of his taxpayer-funded glamorous lifestyle. Too bad it can’t come up with a bill mandating he be effective, competent, and supportive to America’s transportation needs.
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Comments
Seems needlessly punitive in its specificity… almost like a bill of attainder.
It doesn’t matter. No GOP hot-button issue will ever become law. The D leadership in the Senate will either ignore the bill sent over from the House or outright vote it down. And should it ever find Senate approval it will be vetoed by the Dunce-in-Chief.
What the House does have is the power of investigation, and I hope it uses this power to the nth degree.
It does matter because now conservatives can do what the brain dead democrats did and scream at the hill show democrats are doing nothing to improve the lives of Americans yadda, yadda, yadda!!!
Yeah. It’s window dressing. How aboit a bill requiring all government officials to fly commercial first class or (shutter) .. travel by train with the peasants.
First class? Try economy.
Why the hell did it ever become ‘normal’ that any government official gets to live large on our taxes.
Why not a Bill to prevent Pete Buttigeig?
It can apply to any Secretary of Transportation. So I don’t think he can claim that, and I’d bend the rules to target him for his incompetence and waste of our money. That’s an important principle too.
show boat-ism
I’m not really sure I care too much how Buttigieg travels over the fact that one corrupt database file can shutdown a “critical safety system” and ground all planes for a period of time.
Buttigieg’s sole qualifications for Transportation secretary is that he has been rear ended multiple times
Really. If it’s that critical, you’d think there would be redundancies in the system so they could just pull the bad one out and roll over to the next.
Or maybe even do some testing before going live, you know, on the staging environment. There’s a staging environment, right? I mean, that can’t be too new an idea even for the federal government. Can it?
And just think, that $100 BILLION in taxpayer USD that we gave to that fraud by the name of Zelenskyy could have been used right here in the U.S. to improve our “critical safety systems” for the airlines so that a single corrupt database wouldn’t take the whole system down and ground all flights for a period of time.
But nope, gotta waste BILLIONS on a pointless proxy war with Russia.
Go figure.
But Joe doesn’t get 10% of any money that gets spent on the FAA.
speaking of infrastructure. you guys would be frightened at how much of the core systems are built on SW from the early 90s.
No, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. The whole airline system and industry is held together with bailing wire, chewing gum, and duct tape. That there hasn’t been that many significant crashes/accidents is just a luck of the draw every time an airplane takes to the air.
I’d be surprised if the software were as recent as the 90s.
People might think you’re joking. The commission investigating the Challenger shuttle disaster; Richard Feynman found the software used on all the shuttles to be a tangle of wholly outdated patchwork of code. NASA was supposed to be a engineering bureaucracy.
The ruinous ObamaCare website rollout. The California obamacare rollout. On and on it goes.
There have been several attempts to “modernize” US air traffic control automation, both components and whole-system changes. Interesting combinations of “We’re way smarter now than those boneheads.” and “Can’t fail with these new, cool tools.”
Unless there’s been a new try in the last decade, the falures were all epic.
See Robert Glass’ books Project Runaways, and RealTime Software for some more or less case studies, including air trafffic non-progress.
FAA systems still ran on TUBES until the late ’90s. And it wasn’t for EMP hardening.
We knew how to code back then too. I’d be more concerned about the hardware, which does wear out.
Paternity leave?
Has the mother been identified?
If not, what is the evidence of paternity?
The 8 passenger Cessna jets he has been flying in cost $7500-$9000 per hour to fly not counting the price of the 2 pilots. Just to start the engines and let it idle for 10 minutes is $800. Jets are expensive to operate.
And not counting routine maintenance hours associated with those flying ours, and depreciation of the engines and airframe.
Mayor Pete gas trouble sitting down to do work. Needs those wide comfortable seats on private jets. After all, let’s all remember he’s receiveR in his relationship. Isn’t it Mrs. Pete? Nothing too good for the government run by, of and with the pedophiles.
Don’t even get me started on paternity leave for gay men who adopt. Just thinking that for millennia, humans survived while the fathers worked, some even while the mothers worked.