House FAA bill: Plus and Minus for consumers

UPDATED 4/30

The full House passed the bill on a vote of 393-13, after adding two important provisions. The bill must now be reconciled with a Senate version. The two notable additions:

1. FAA is mandated, within one year, to develop regulations for minimum seat pitch and seat width on commercial airliners. This has been a big consumer issue, and one the airlines have tried to prevent

2. Creation of an FAA hotline and smartphone app to allow travelers to easily file complaints with the agency. 

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A new FAA authorization bill to be debated in the House of Representatives this week is chockful of goodies—and baddies—for passengers and the airline industry.

The bill, which would extend FAA’s authority to collect taxes and fees for five years, is a bipartisan (read horse-trading) product of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Consumer goodies include a ban on bumping passengers who have already boarded a plane; on the minus side (or plus for the airlines), carriers would be allowed to go back to advertising fares without revealing all the extras until the end.

That last would repeal FAA’s 2012 regulation requiring airlines to include taxes when the fare is first mentioned; taxes average about 20% of the total. Under the House bill, airlines would only be required to include a link to the tax info.

Other items in the bill include

• Ban on voice calls during flight. There’s already an FCC ban on cell system calls, but the ban would now include WiFi-based calls, such as Skype.
• Require airlines to post prominent website notices when their computer systems are having major disruptions, with information on how travelers will be affected
• Secondary barriers for cockpits, to block access when pilots must leave the flight deck
• Require the FAA to consult with the National Transportation Safety Board, airlines, emergency responders and plane manufacturers and report back within a year on whether changes in evacuation procedures are needed.

Not in the bill, this time around

• Privatization of the air traffic control system, proposed last year by Committee chairman Bill Shuster. It would have created a non-profit industry-controlled corporation to take over and modernize.
• Permission for airports to raise Passenger Facility Charges from $4.50 to $8.50. PFCs are a per-ticket surcharge that can be levied by an airport operator to help pay for airport projects. It’s been capped since 2000. However, the bill does add $1 billion in new Federal grants for airport projects, up from $3.35 billion last year.

After the House and Senate both act, any differences between the two bills must be resolved by vote of both houses before being sent to the President.