The Federal Aviation Administration FAA

On June 30, 1956, two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon, killing 128 people in what was then the deadliest commercial air disaster in history. Both planes had been flying under visual rules in uncontrolled airspace, and the investigation exposed a system split between agencies that could not keep pace with the jet age. Congress responded with the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, creating an independent Federal Aviation Agency with authority over all civil airspace. When the Department of Transportation opened in 1967 the agency moved into it and was renamed the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA does two jobs that are sometimes in tension. It operates the National Airspace System, the largest and most complex in the world, through about 14,000 air traffic controllers working in more than 300 towers, approach facilities, and en-route centers that handle roughly 45,000 flights a day. And it regulates aviation safety: it certifies the design and manufacture of every aircraft and engine, licenses pilots and mechanics, inspects airlines and repair stations, and writes the rules that govern everything from cockpit rest to drone flights. It also funds airport construction and licenses commercial space launches.

The agency employs about 45,000 people, more than three quarters of the Department of Transportation's workforce, and is led by an Administrator appointed for a five-year term. Commercial aviation's safety record in the decades after 2009 was the best in its history, with long stretches without a fatal crash on a U.S. airline. That record was broken in January 2025, when a passenger jet and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac near Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, the deadliest American air disaster in more than two decades.

Two problems dominate the agency's agenda. Its air traffic control system runs on technology decades old, with copper wire, floppy disks, and radar outages that forced ground stops at Newark in 2025, and modernization programs have run years late and billions over budget. And the 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019 revealed that the FAA had delegated much of Boeing's certification work to Boeing's own employees, prompting reforms in 2020 and continuing scrutiny of how closely it oversees the companies it regulates. A chronic shortage of trained controllers compounds both.