Notam Improvement Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. STAUBER. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in support of my bipartisan legislation that improves the safety of air travel. I also thank my colleague, Mr. DeSaulnier, for his support and leadership on this legislation, as well.

In 2022, the United States was home to 8 of the top 10 busiest airports in the world. This means that, as Americans, we have no room for error when it comes to aviation safety.

Although aviation is the safest form of travel, we must always strive to be better. This is why we must address the notice to air missions, or NOTAMs, system.

NOTAMs provide current, up-to-the-minute data to pilots on any aspect of their flight. Unfortunately, NOTAMs are often buried in lengthy reports, conflating important safety information with more common alerts. These inefficiencies have the potential to create life- threatening situations, which have just been mentioned.

On January 11, 2023, all U.S. domestic flights were grounded for the first time since 9/11. The latest reports from the FAA suggest that the unintentional deletion of files caused this chaos.

No one person or one file should be able to take down our whole flight safety system, but the NOTAM system is old and antiquated so it comes as no real surprise.

Unfortunately, leadership at the Department of Transportation is more concerned with woke politics and changing the name of the system, rather than appropriate upgrades for aviation safety.

Mr. Speaker, I have been advocating for NOTAM upgrades for 4 years now. My legislation, which creates a task force at the FAA with important input from safety experts and industry professionals to address both efficiency and resiliency of the NOTAM system, has passed out of the House both in the 116th Congress and in the 117th Congress in a bipartisan fashion, only to die in the Senate.

I encourage my colleagues in both the House and the Senate to pass my legislation before another failure of the NOTAM system occurs. Our pilots, crew members, and passengers are counting on us.

Mr. Speaker, we do have a change in the 118th Congress. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is being led by two of my friends. Chairman Sam Graves is ready, able, and willing to change how the committee works and actually bring forth legislation that is good for the American people and good for our transportation. I have full faith in my good friend, Ranking Member Larsen to do the same. We have worked together in the past, and I see this committee succeeding with the leadership that I have previously seen by the chair and the ranking member.

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