Trump's FAA nominee says he'll hold Boeing 'accountable'

President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the FAA said Wednesday that he would hold Boeing "accountable to deliver a high-quality product safely,” as the plane maker continues to face the fallout from a string of sometimes deadly safety issues with its 737 Max jets.

Republic Airways CEO Bryan Bedford, who Trump has tapped to lead the Federal Aviation Administration, said during a Senate confirmation hearing that he would work with Boeing instead of just scolding it. Bedford said the FAA could tell Boeing “where the failures are” and “move the process along a little quicker.”

Boeing has been throttled by ongoing safety failures with planes, including accidents that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019.

In May, Boeing said its new safety processes had streamlined to the point where they were consistently building 38 planes per month, as per an FAA-imposed cap after the Alaskan Airways incident of 2024, in which an emergency door blew open. Boeing had hoped to up that to 48 planes a month in a year’s time, but last week acting FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau said that was not going to happen any time soon. He did note, however, that Boeing had made improvements.

In advance of Bedford’s confirmation hearing, Reuters reported that he cited a “lack of steady and qualified leadership” at the FAA, which led to a “lack of any coherent strategy or vision.” Bedford argued that, "A malaise has set in whereby managers believe the agency is helpless to make the necessary changes, and furthermore, they rationalize it isn’t really their fault."

At the hearing itself, Bedford said that he had asked FAA employees what their goals were and said he was shocked to hear them answer that “they don’t have any."

The FAA’s biggest current challenge is the crisis in air traffic control, leading to incidents like the January collision near Washington Reagan Airport or the recent outages at Newark Liberty International Airport.

Rocheleau said the entire system needs an overhaul, citing the fact that many facilities—some of which are more than 50 years old—still use floppy disks and paper strips. Bedford says that when he asked FAA employees how the system could change, they merely answered that they would work harder. "That's just not the kind of leadership that we're going to need in order to get the job done," he told the hearing.