Sen. Sullivan celebrates multi-million dollar investment in Alaska aviation safety

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Sen. Dan Sullivan and the Alaska Congressional Delegation are welcoming a $25 million investment from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to improve safety in Alaska’s skies.

The FAA will authorize $25 million annually from fiscal year 2025 through 2028 for the Don Young Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative.

“We launched this initiative last year in the FAA reauthorization bill — I was able to get this $25 million provision authorized to bring a lot more infrastructure,” Sullivan told Alaska’s News Source. “But it’s just a down payment.

“We need a lot more than that, and so this is the Trump administration working with us. You know, there’s been a lot of stories about the Trump administration cutting, but this is the Trump administration coming to Alaska saying, hey, we know this is a priority.”

Sullivan said that one of the reasons this was pushed through is his relationship with the new Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy.

“After the Bering Air crash, he called me, ‘Senator, what can we do?‘,” Sullivan said.

“Since that time, he’s reached out to me two different times, ‘Hey, what more can we do?’ And then they called just two days ago, saying we saw your FAA provision on the $25 million, we’re going to appropriate for it right now.

“And this is a down payment because they said we need to do more.”

The FAA investment was in direct response to a 2020 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report that showed aviation accidents in Alaska happen at a rate 2.35 times higher than the rest of the United States. The report also showed that Alaska’s fatal accident rate was 1.34 times higher than that of the rest of the U.S.

“What I’ve been able to do in the committee (United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation) is tell my Senate colleagues — Democrats and Republicans — ‘Hey look, you guys have all of this infrastructure and you’re in the Lower 48. You wouldn’t even accept an airport not having the kind of runway and weather reporting and other infrastructure that you have down there.’ And we don’t have that. Yeah, it’s more expensive in Alaska, but too bad. We’re all Americans and we should have that," Sullivan said.

“The FAA system is for the whole country. It doesn’t exclude Alaska, so that’s why I’ve been able to get so many of these provisions in these bills because I think most senators, they kind of say, ‘Alright, Dan, that’s a legit argument.‘”

Sullivan said the FAA money will help expand satellite use in Alaska, growing the number from the current four testing sites to 16.

“A lot more airports will have weather reporting systems and the really exciting thing here is it’s using new technology to link to satellites to make this much more efficient and much more timely,” Sullivan explained.

So would the $25 million investment have been able to prevent the Bering Air crash in February? Sullivan can’t say for sure, but he has been close to the investigation.

“There’s been a preliminary report,” Sullivan said. “It’s looking at things like the weight of the aircraft, the weather, and also things like what the tower was getting in terms of communications, the tower in the Nome area, and the lessons that we need to learn from that, the NTSB is already starting to process. I’ve been briefed on it. I don’t want to get ahead of them.

“But I think the final report is gonna talk about some of the things that I just mentioned. And I would imagine it’s going to talk about more real-time communications, if the tower in Nome had information on weather, the ability to get that out to pilots that are actually flying in the region, I think might be something they’re going to dig into.”

Ultimately, Sullivan believes the stars are aligning for a bright and safe future when it comes to Alaska aviation safety.

“All of these things come together in terms of our aviation, but getting more weather reporting and the infrastructure to do so in all of our airports [is coming with this new funding].”

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