Opening Session, U.S.-India Aviation Summit

Good morning, everyone. I'm honored to be here today with this very esteemed group. I want to thank USTDA (United States Trade and Development Agency) for sponsoring and AAAE (American Association of Airport Executives) for executing this really important meeting. We have a lot of government officials and industry reps here today, especially the participants from Bhutan, Nepal, and the Maldives. Welcome.

I am especially honored to be here because for me, India, has played an important role throughout my aviation career. Almost 30 years ago, as a junior executive at United Airlines, I was tasked to get the authority to launch a Chicago-Delhi-Hong Kong service. United Flights 1 and 2, for those of you aviation geeks, or the old Pan Am around the world routes that United acquired. That allowed me to have numerous trips to India in the 90's as part of the U.S. delegation, and also, private meetings on the commercial side. For me, it was my introduction to India, to Indian Aviation, and also to some new friendships that have endured to this day. Fifteen years ago, in 2009, I moved to the Delhi region to work on aviation, working with Interglobe as they launched the then fledgling Indigo Airlines.

I was an early witness to the dramatic growth in travel that has occurred in India over these recent decades. 2009 also marked the second U.S.-India aviation conference. At that conference the then Secretary of Civil Aviation gave a wildly optimistic projection for the potential growth of India's aviation sector, predicting that domestic traffic would reach 160 million by 2020. Of course, it turns out that was actually a very conservative estimate. It went from 143 million to 375 million for that period of time, more than doubling. As the Secretary [Shri Vumlungmang Vualnam, Secretary Ministry of Civil Aviation] mentioned, the number of airports has already doubled in India in just the last ten years, and the number of international destinations has increased from 50 to 80, a 60 percent growth during that time.

IATA (International Air Transport Association) estimates that by the end of 2026 India will be the third largest single aviation market in the world. I'm here to kick off, what I know will be a very full agenda over the next few days to renew our partnership in this post-Covid environment. I just would like to make a couple of observations about what I see as opportunities for the U.S and South Asia to work on in this unique time for aviation.

My first observation is that it is, in fact, a very unique time in aviation. We're going through a sort of a renaissance in aviation. Not only has traditional aviation roared back after Covid, recovering to pre-COVID levels and above, it's also a very good time to be in the aviation market. All the job categories are highly sought after. Pilots are much better paid then they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago and we have an abundance of new entrants coming into the market. What we call advanced air mobility -commonly referred to as flying cars - are a real thing. We will start to see those certified in the coming years. Supersonic aircraft are back on the drawing board. Drone delivery is going to become ubiquitous in the coming years. Rocket launches currently in the U.S. go up about the pace of three a week. That's great and is continuing to advance very quickly.

So, it's a very exciting time to be in aviation. But it also means drastic changes in how people view aviation and how they interact with aviation, in ways that have never been envisioned before. So, for regulators it means new questions about how we oversee those operations. We have to find a safe, yet nimble, way to regulate these new entrants who are operating at the speed of a startup while we are operating at the speed of government. We need to figure out a way to close that gap and how to identify these risks and understand how to safely incorporate them into the airspace.

My second observation is that the public has very high expectations for aviation safety. Those expectations are rising, and we have been put on notice. In the U.S., we've seen the public perception of safety and risk evolve over a long time. As more people have access to aviation, expectations have grown that the system will be completely safe. I've seen this play out in the U.S. market over the past few decades with the rise of low-cost carriers, as more people are able to afford to fly for the first time.

As the Secretary mentioned, this is happening in India as well as aviation is becoming more available to all Indians and to all people.

When I started aviation accidents were unfortunately not uncommon. They were all annual events. Safety regulators learned from those accidents and made the system safer. For the past couple of decades, we've moved beyond that model, thankfully, and accidents are now extremely rare, and they are simply unacceptable as an outcome. More recently, we have focused on analyzing failures in the system, failures that didn't lead to accidents. But failures that are no longer tolerated by the flying public. So, whether that's a plug door that failed due to a manufacturing error or a landing gear that fails due to a maintenance error, these are failures in the protective layers of our safety system, and they're simply no longer acceptable outcomes. Our challenge is to bring safety to the next level, and that means we need to proactively analyze data and find those risks of failure and mitigate those risks before they happen.

That brings me to my third observation, which is that safety is a team sport. I think this would be a really good time to incorporate a metaphor about cricket. In spite of living in India for two years, I still don't understand the game. Our national systems of aviation are inextricably linked to a single global network. We have adjoining airspaces. We have integrated supply chains. And we have international services that connect our economies and our people.
We need to work together on issues like safety. We need to share ideas and share innovations, especially in how to safely incorporate some of these new technologies into our airspace. So, while we have different systems that will certainly take different approaches to solving the challenges that we have, we can and should work together to share best practices and learn from one another.

We all have an interest in increasing safety within our respective countries, but we must work together to increase the level of safety in the global aviation system. And this means sharing data. Sharing information allows us to better identify and mitigate risks before those risks become accidents, and even before they become failures to the safety in our systems.

I think we have a unique opportunity to get this right. It is my top priority, in my role as FAA Administrator. I think it's a great opportunity for us to use this forum to find ways that we can cooperate on safety and really raise it to the next level where we're proactively looking at data and trying to predict where these failures might happen.

So, with that, welcome. I'm very glad to have all of you here today and look forward to a very productive session. Thank you.