House Republican opposes Biden pick to run FAA

US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chair on Thursday said Republicans will not grant a waiver to allow President Joe Biden's pick to head the FAA. Republicans have said Biden's nominee Phil Washington needs a waiver because he does not qualify as a civilian under the law. Washington, the Denver International Airport chief executive, was nominated in July but the Senate Commerce Committee has yet to hold a hearing. "The FAA is running on autopilot. You can only run on autopilot so long before you run out of gas, you wake up and your over Utah," said Representative Sam Graves, a Republican who heads the committee overseeing the FAA. Republicans have harshly criticized the FAA after the Notice to Air Missions pilot messaging database failed, which led to a more than 90-minute nationwide grounding of planes on Jan. 11 that disrupted more than 11,000 flights, the first such halt since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. "You want to talk about crippling the country and showing our enemies just how vulnerable we are," Graves said of the NOTAM outage. "They've got to get their act together, they've really do, they've got to modernize their processes and their system." The NOTAM system provides pilots, flight crews and other users of US airspace with critical safety notices.<br/>