No one was in charge of the Federal Aviation Administration last night when a commercial flight collided with a helicopter as it was about to land at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., killing everyone aboard.
Mike Whitaker, the previous FAA administrator, stepped down on Inauguration Day after just over a year on the job. He’d repeatedly clashed with Elon Musk — now in charge of a group tasked with slashing the government’s headcount by President Donald Trump — over safety issues at his space company, SpaceX.
“The United States is the safest and most complex airspace in the world, and that is because of your commitment to the safety of the flying public,” Whitaker said in his farewell to the agency.
Newly-confirmed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy did not answer a reporter’s question about whether there is an acting FAA director at a press conference about the crash.
Last September, the FAA slapped Musk’s rocket company with $633,009 in fines as punishment for a series of three safety violations in May and June of 2023, as The Verge noted.
“Humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Musk wrote in frustration.
At the same time, the FAA and SpaceX were also arguing over the timeline for the fifth test flight of SpaceX’s Starship, with federal officials grounding the massive rocket for months to conduct a thorough review.
“They’ve been around 20 years,” Whitaker told lawmakers of SpaceX during a House hearing, “and I think they need to operate at the highest level of safety,” including by adding a “whistleblower program.”
The feud escalated from there, with SpaceX accusing the agency of “regulatory overreach” and Musk promising to sue. Less than a week later, Musk publicly called for Whitaker’s resignation.
On Thursday, after the crash, Trump hurriedly named Chris Rocheleau as acting administrator of the FAA. Investigators have not determined the cause of the wreck, but at a press conference, Trump blamed diversity hires.