Before retiring, Shuster left a parting gift to the travel
community: a reauthorization bill for the FAA that's most remarkable feature is
its length. The nine-term Pennsylvania Republican announced at the beginning of
this year that he would not seek reelection and instead wanted to spend his
last year as House Transportation Committee chairman, a role term limits would
have ended even if he sought reelection, focusing on infrastructure. Shuster was
a primary advocate for decoupling air traffic control from the FAA into a
separate, nonprofit corporation.
He never got enough support, though, to pass both houses of
Congress. His committee did, however, accomplish something that hasn't been
done since 1982: pass a reauthorization bill that provides five years of
appropriations to the FAA. The longest reauthorization in recent history was
for three years, starting in 2012; subsequent reauthorizations simply kicked
the can down the road for a year at a time.
Even without the ATC provision, Shuster's
legislation includes components that will impact business travel down the road.
It calls on the FAA to determine minimum seat sizes to meet health and safety
needs for passengers, bans involuntary bumping of passengers from aircrafts
after they have boarded and provides for a reexamination of the prohibition on
exceeding the speed of sound over U.S. soil, which in effect has placed a ban
on supersonic aircraft.