Buttigieg: FAA ‘doing a great job’ handling Alaska Airlines incident

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday that he has full confidence in the Federal Aviation Administration's leadership, as concerns over Boeing's 737 MAX 9 planes mount following last week's mid-air blowout of a covered-over door on an Alaska Airlines flight.

“I have confidence in any aircraft cleared by the FAA,” Buttigieg told reporters following remarks at a transportation event in Washington, D.C.

“The FAA’s doing a great job and [FAA Administrator] Mike Whitaker’s doing a great job,” Buttigieg said when asked if the agency has the resources it needs to approve plane designs and respond to accidents like the one near Portland, Oregon. He praised the FAA's decision to ground the U.S. fleet of 171 MAX 9 jets pending inspections, and noted that agency staff is working long hours responding to the situation.

Still, he said the images of the Alaska Airlines jet with a gaping hole in the middle of a cabin filled with passengers affected him.

“Anybody looking at those pictures has to be thinking about what you’d do in that situation,” Buttigieg said, noting that he’d recently been on a plane with one of his children. “That is what’s on our mind.”

Buttigieg said he’d spoken with Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun and had impressed on him the idea that the public needs to have confidence in Boeing’s quality and design.

"Every plane they deliver to an airline, every plane that goes in the sky needs to be 100 percent safe,” Buttigieg said. “They need to be able to demonstrate that, which means finding and fixing anything related to this issue."

When asked when the grounded 737 MAX 9 jets would be returned to service, Buttigieg said that “the only consideration for the timeline is safety."

“Nobody can or should be rushing that process," he said.

He said airline delays related to the MAX grounding should be treated like a customer service problem, where passengers are entitled to extra help from airlines with canceled flights, as opposed to a routine delay like weather where airlines are not responsible. DOT has established new rights that airline passengers have when flights are delayed or canceled.