​Administrator Goes In Depth on the FAA’s Next Act

Bryan Bedford took over leadership of the FAA in July 2025 after a long career in commercial aviation, including senior roles at Republic Airways and Frontier Airlines. He is an instrument-rated pilot, an aircraft owner, and one of the few recent agency leaders to arrive in Washington, D.C., with direct experience in both a general aviation cockpit and the airline C-suite.

Some in aviation may also remember him from an appearance on reality TV’s Undercover Boss, a fitting footnote for an executive whose management style has long emphasized seeing operations up close rather than from a distance. So close, in fact, that Bedford can be seen in the show servicing lavatories on a Frontier Airbus jet.

That operating background now intersects with a White House that has pushed the FAA to move faster. In FLYING’s conversation with Bedford, he repeatedly pointed to President Donald Trump’s role in setting the tone and timetable for the agency’s agenda—from air traffic control (ATC) modernization to drone policy, supersonic flight, and broader aviation innovation. Bedford said the president has been unusually clear about what he wants delivered, and he described the FAA and Department of Transportation as “moving at the speed of Trump” on initiatives tied to those priorities.

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

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Nine months into the job, Bedford framed the FAA less as an agency building toward distant benchmarks than one being pressed to show measurable progress on a shorter clock. He discussed the administration’s push for a “brand-new” ATC system, the role AI and machine learning could play in future traffic management, what MOSAIC could mean for general aviation, and why the fight over landing fees and ADS-B has become a safety issue in his eyes.

FLYING interviewed Bedford at the agency’s headquarters in Washington in April. What follows is an edited Q&A for length and clarity:

Setting the Pace

FLYING Magazine (FM): Your first year on the job is coming up this summer. As you look at the agency today, what do you think has changed the most?

Bryan Bedford (BB): Well, so much has changed. I want to be careful, but I think the biggest thing is our focus. We’ve got Flight Plan 2026, and the purpose of that is to drive agency focus from the top of the executive branch all the way down to the front line that’s delivering the services, whether you’re a technician, a controller, or a regional manager. We just wanted to make sure everybody was aligned on the same priorities.

Generally, the FAA, when it would put out a plan, it would be no less than five years and generally a 10-year-long plan. So there was never really that excitement that we can see things being accomplished. So we set goals and we actually finish goals. That ability to connect to the fact that we’re doing things and we’re doing it at speed, I think, is creating a sense of energy and accomplishment.

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Of course, we redesigned the organizational structure, just trying to flatten it out a bit, make it more accountable, and make it easier to manage from an executive sense. And this is my perspective, not necessarily the agency’s perspective, but I think most people who come into this role tend to want to fly it at about 30,000 feet. I really want to get below the surface, so to speak, and see if we’re being effective. What are the issues that our frontline employees are feeling on a day-to-day basis? And are we giving them the solutions?

FM: You came from the private sector, and the airline business moves fast. What was the biggest transition coming into government?

BB: As I testified, I’m not political. I don’t profess to understand it. It’s a contact sport I’ve never played before. So I have a hard time really adapting to the political nature of some of the decisions that we make. That’s created a learning curve for me to understand that I’m not the CEO of a business. I am one cog in a really big machine.

Understanding what the big boss wants to deliver and making sure that our resources are aligned with delivering on the executive orders—that’s something where frankly the president’s been really, really clear about what his priorities are, and that’s given the agency a lot of direction that we can actually turn into action, like eVTOLs, supersonic, and space. There’s a lot of innovation that this administration is feverishly trying to unlock, and to the extent it touches the FAA or the DOT, we’re certainly moving at the speed of Trump to try to make those executive orders turn into rulemaking and then turn into actual innovation that customers feel.

FM: That is a striking phrase—“moving at the speed of Trump.” Does that urgency change the way the FAA operates?

BB: It does, because it gives us clarity. The president’s been really clear about what his priorities are. That allows us to align resources around delivering on those priorities instead of drifting into long-term discussions without real action. We’re trying to do things and do them at speed.

Modernizing ATC

FM: Let’s talk about the new air traffic control system. For pilots, especially in general aviation, what does that actually mean?

BB: In the most practical terms, you’ve seen a step-function change in how aeromedical works. We went from having over 4,900 medical certificates outstanding for more than 18 months to less than 142 outstanding for more than six months. So again, this idea that there’s a sense of urgency, and we want to actually fix things that are pain points for our stakeholders. And, certainly, GA is a huge stakeholder for us.

But on the modernization side, I think the easiest way to explain it is this: Next-gen, for all of the good things it did, brought us a lot of great technologies, but the adoption cycle is measured in decades, not years. And the president gave me and the secretary very clear instructions that he wants this brand-new air traffic control system built before he leaves office, which gives us a really hard date in 2028.

So we’ve created a waterfall implementation that completes in Q4 of 2028. And we’re either on track or ahead of that deployment. The long poles in the tent were on the supply-chain side—buy 612 radars, make sure you got a great price, and they can be delivered and operational in three years. Same thing with voice switches. Same thing with the analog-to-digital conversion.

FM: And that is only the first step?

BB: Right. [This] is very equipment focused. Modernization, which is what the president really wants to get at, requires a second level of funding, and that is to actually bring advanced automation, AI, machine learning, all of those things that are going to be needed to manage traffic in the 21st century. That stuff has to ride on a cloud-native architecture that has unlimited compute power to do all the things those advanced algorithms need to do. We don’t have that in the current data architecture for the FAA. So there is a second step, which we’re busily working on, to transform how data is managed and acted upon.

FM: You mentioned AI and machine learning. What specifically are you looking at?

BB: I won’t get too deep into the weeds, but we’ve got three labs in here competing right now for what we would think of as a transformational use of technology or use of advanced machine learning and AI—pre-flying, if you will, to develop four-dimensional flight trajectories that are strategically deconflicted before planes leave the ground.

Versus today, how we manage it is you file a flight plan, we accept your flight plan, you try to fly your flight plan, and then we apply separation. That’s the mission. The FAA’s job is to separate traffic. Full stop. What if we could actually start the day knowing that all the four-dimensional flight trajectories were deconflicted before we said, “You’re clear”? That can happen. The technology is available today. This isn’t next-gen. This isn’t [saying], “Let’s figure it out in 10 years and talk about it for 10 years.” We’re trying to figure it out today and then talk about it next month.

FM: A big part of this conversation is still staffing, especially controllers. Where do you see the bottlenecks?

BB: When you say bottlenecks and constraints, you’re talking my language. Very early on after onboarding with the FAA, we started to get the executive team introduced to the theory of constraints and do theory of constraints training, to actually start speaking with a common language of what are we chasing here. If we want to make things better, we have to understand where things are breaking down and employ first principles as opposed to just saying, “Here’s a workaround.”

If you look at our Flight Plan 2026, people are the foundation of safety in the NAS [National Airspace System]. It is a highly tactical, human-in-the-loop safety system. And we do need better tools. We do need more well-trained people, and we need better tools for them to utilize once they are on board with us. So, yes, we’re looking at a number of constraints. 

How we onboard them takes too long. How we train them takes too long because of the way the training is chopped up and delivered. How we deploy them to the facilities is a really arduous process that we’re also trying to streamline. And then once you get onto the facility, you go through OJI [On-the-Job Instruction]—and guess what? We have 318 facilities, and none of them do it exactly the same way. So bringing in standard operating procedures and standard curriculum, those become opportunities for improvement.

MOSAIC and GA Access

FM: If you were talking directly to the general aviation community, what would you tell them they could expect by 2030?

BB: From the GA community perspective, I think what we would like is more precision and less uncertainty in aviation across the ecosystem. More predictability, more certainty, less uncertainty. In my mind, less uncertainty means less risk. We would like to take risk out of the system over the next three to four years.

Part of that, we can look at MOSAIC as an example. We can go from highly prescriptive regulations to highly performance-based regulations that allow the industry to innovate but still meet what we really need in terms of driving safety. It’s also working with the GA community when we’re identifying risk—how we identify risk, where the hot spots are, how we communicate with the industry to say there are things that we need them to address.

We’re looking at visual separation procedures and mountainous terrain as examples of places where we see risk that we need to be proactively working with the community to address. Same thing in Alaska. What can we do up in Alaska? We see risk. We have mitigation, whether that’s AWOS now or remote digital towers. How do we get more capabilities by using 4D camera systems in places? I just think there’s a lot of opportunity to deploy technology that’s available today that will improve service and reduce risk.

FM: Let’s talk about MOSAIC. What is your vision for it?

BB: I think MOSAIC is all about unlocking innovation in light sport and experimental aircraft. Frankly, when we apply highly prescriptive requirements, people try to meet them, but that doesn’t always give us the safest answer. It could mean taking weight out of aircraft that we really don’t want to take out—we want the stability and the ruggedness there—but they’re trying to meet a prescriptive requirement that keeps them out of a higher level of compliance.

So again, it’s trying to focus on what are the safety issues that we’re trying to drive for—stall speed, upset recovery performance, dynamic stability. How do we allow innovators to innovate around the core things that matter for safety without being so down in the weeds that we are limiting the ability of people to innovate?

FM: Do you see MOSAIC as a dramatic shift for general aviation, or just another opportunity for innovation?

BB: I think it’s dramatic for the FAA because it’s out of—you could argue—our normal operational process, which means there’s a little discomfort here. Different innovators are going to have a different approach to how they deliver the performance, which is a departure from the cookie-cutter “we do this, then we do this, then we do this, and then we certify it.”

The same thing will be true [for drones]. We are moving to a much more performance-based, industry-consensus set of standards again. We’re trying to listen. The FAA is not well known for listening to industry and collaborating. But the president’s been clear he wants us to unlock drone dominance. And the way to do that is actually to listen to what the drone community needs to be able to innovate. 

FM: Let’s turn to landing fees and GA access. This has become a flash point, especially at training-heavy airports. Is there a point where the FAA steps in?

BB: Well, first of all, airports are allowed to charge for services. They can do that. How they go about that matters, and how they assess the fees matters. I think what’s got people upset is the fact that we have created a safety technology called ADS-B. Aircraft are certainly better with it. Pilot situational awareness is better with it. But if we have people making a bad safety decision to avoid rates and charges, that’s where I think the FAA wants to throw the penalty flag.

That is not the intended use of ADS-B. It’s a safety tool, a critical safety tool, and we need it to act as such and not have pilots turning systems off—safety-critical systems off—because they’re being used in a way that isn’t intentional for their purpose.

FM: Where does the FAA draw the line between airport cost recovery and keeping training cost effective for pilots?

BB: The bottom line is that if an airport accepts federal grants, the fees it charges for airfield use generally can’t be more than the costs of providing the airfield. 

And where I fly, in central Indiana, GA is really, really welcome, and we haven’t seen this type of behavior where we have pilots fighting with the airport operators.

There are different models there. We’ve got privatization. We’ve got public-private partnerships, but for the most part that’s been a very symbiotic relationship to make sure that GA has the access it needs, that it’s affordable, and certainly for the pilot-development community.

So I am aware where we’ve seen certain states and municipalities moving in a different direction. I think I’ll say it’s on the radar.

What He’d Change First

FM: Last question. If you could change one thing immediately within the national airspace system—flip a switch tomorrow—what would it be?

BB: If I could flip the switch tomorrow, I would rebuild every one of the 1960s facilities. I’d wave my magic wand and make all of those 1960s facilities come up to 21st-century facilities. If I think about it, that’s the longest pole in the FAA tent.

We’ll get the people squared away in the next three years. We’ll get the equipment technology squared away in the next three years. We’ll get the data architecture squared away in the next three years, and we will do transformational things with how airspace works in the next three years. But the one thing I can’t fix is the brick-and-mortar stuff. There’s no money to do it, and it’s unsustainable.

So if I could fix one thing overnight, it would be all of that brick-and-mortar infrastructure that is just really underinvested right now.

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This feature first appeared in the June Ultimate Issue 971 of the FLYING print edition.