History seems to be trying to repeat itself on the current effort by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to overhaul its hodgepodge of flight crew duty, flight and rest requirements. Changes proposed 15 years ago were blasted by the airlines as costly and lacking the support of data. That rule-making effort languished until the FAA scrapped it in 2009 and established another committee to formulate recommendations.
Again, the labor and industry representatives on the committee reached no consensus on several key items, and the FAA had to choose among various recommendations. Again, the resulting proposal drew more than 2,000 public comments that included barbs from the airlines.
Comments by several airlines echoed those of the Air Transport Association of America (ATA) — the largest airline trade group in the United States — which summarized its 270-page response by saying that the proposal should be withdrawn because it goes “well beyond what current scientific r…
