Bryan Bedford, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration, told senators on Wednesday that he would make air travel safety his top priority if confirmed as the agency’s next administrator.
Mr. Bedford, who spent decades running and revamping regional commercial airlines, pressed his credentials before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in a confirmation hearing that comes at a critical juncture for the agency. In recent months, it has scrambled to address staffing shortages among air traffic controllers, modernize outdated technology that has cause significant outages and delays, and quell mounting concerns about passenger safety in the wake of a fatal crash outside Ronald Reagan National Airport on Jan. 29.
“If confirmed, my top priority will be public safety and restoring the public’s confidence in flying,” Mr. Bedford told senators, pointing to his tenure as the president, chief executive and director of Republic Airways as the experience necessary to aggressively carry out changes at the agency.
But leaders of the panel were split along party lines over whether they believed Mr. Bedford — who as an airline executive openly criticized certain federal aviation safety standards — was the right man for the job.
“I do have concerns about the long opposition to the F.A.A.’s 1,500-hour rule,” Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, the panel’s top Democrat, said to Mr. Bedford, referring to a requirement that commercial airline pilots have logged 1,500 flight training hours.
Mr. Bedford has been outspoken about his disdain for the rule, which was established by Congress after a deadly 2009 regional airline crash in Buffalo, and went into effect in 2013. Family members of those killed in the crash, Colgan Air Flight 3407, attended Wednesday’s hearing.
“It’s important that we have an F.A.A. administrator who strengthens our aviation standards to honor the families who have lost loved ones in accidents,” Ms. Cantwell said.
During congressional testimony in 2014, Mr. Bedford called the rule “arbitrary” and complaining that it would “hasten the growing pilot shortage.” In 2022, under his leadership, Republic Airways petitioned the F.A.A. to allow graduates of the company’s flight school to be required to complete only 750 flight training hours — the same as the agency requires of military pilots who want to become commercial pilots. The F.A.A. denied the petition.
A spokeswoman for the Transportation Department said before the hearing that if confirmed, Mr. Bedford would follow the laws set forth by Congress, which set the requirement of 1,500 flight hours.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bedford said that when it came to training, he was “a big supporter of structured training as opposed to pure time building.”
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the panel’s chairman, suggested he was sympathetic to Mr. Bedford’s complaints about the 1,500-hour rule.
“Fifteen hundred hours of mindless banner towing is no way to train a commercial pilot,” Mr. Cruz said during the hearing.
In a recent questionnaire obtained by The New York Times that Mr. Bedford prepared for the committee, he pledged to use his management experience in the private sector to address longstanding technology problems and staffing gaps that were highlighted by the crash at Reagan National Airport in January.
He also committed to senators that if confirmed, he would serve a full five-year term to ensure that the agency had stable leadership as it tried to accelerated fixes. The F.A.A. has had five leaders in the last four years.
In his questionnaire, Mr. Bedford also roundly criticized the agency he hopes to lead for what he called a “lack of strategic vision” and a “profound lack of trust with and within the agency.”
Democrats are also expected to ask Mr. Bedford about comments he made in 2019, hinting that he would be in favor of allowing commercial flights to be flown by a single pilot. He argued that lawmakers were too skittish and the pilots’ lobby too powerful to allow the industry to move away from the two-pilot requirement.
“I don’t think in my lifetime we’re going to see the commercial passenger flying done with less than two pilots,” he said during a talk at Liberty University in 2019, adding, “I don’t think the Congress has the courage, even if the data and the science suggests it makes sense.”
Democrats are also expected to scrutinize Mr. Bedford’s personal interests during the hearing. In ethics disclosures, Mr. Bedford promised to resign from his current positions running or serving on the boards of various airlines, noting that he expected to receive a lump-sum severance payment and outstanding bonuses from Republic upon resigning from his position, should he be confirmed as the next F.A.A. administrator.
A spokeswoman for the Transportation Department said Mr. Bedford, if confirmed, would comply with conflict-of-interest laws.
