Rep. Pete Stauber's FAA task force bill signed by Biden

WASHINGTON — GOP Rep. Pete Stauber's bill designed to improve a key system for flights has become law after a messy January outage.

Democratic President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan legislation Saturday that will create a Federal Aviation Administration task force.

"It's going to bring the safety experts, representatives for the pilots unions [and] cybersecurity experts to the table to look at this system and to make it better," said Stauber, who represents Minnesota's Eighth District. "And it's going to make our skies safer."

The bill, also led by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, moved through Congress after a NOTAM — or Notice to Air Missions — system outage led the FAA to ground all U.S. departures for nearly two hours on Jan. 11, according to details provided to a U.S. Senate panel.

"That was devastating to the traveling public," Stauber said. "There's no doubt about it."

The FAA defines NOTAM as "a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means."

Klobuchar said in an interview that the bipartisan bill acknowledges "government isn't just going to do this by itself, that we need to get all of the stakeholders involved in making recommendations to strengthen the resiliency and cybersecurity of the system."

Later in January, the FAA said a preliminary review showed "that contract personnel unintentionally deleted files," and added that it had "so far found no evidence of a cyber-attack or malicious intent."

A spokesperson for the FAA said in a Monday email the agency does not comment on legislation.

The Stauber-led law details that the task force will focus on reviewing current methods for publishing NOTAMs and also figure out best practices for presenting flight operations info for pilots, among other responsibilities. It also is set to make recommendations for improvements.

Stauber had tried to move earlier versions of the bill through Congress. It easily passed the House in 2019 and 2021 only to stall on Capitol Hill. Then in late January after the outage, the bill cleared the House on a 424 to 4 vote with every Minnesota lawmaker in the chamber voting for it.

"The outage in January helped the Senate bring it forward," Stauber said.