United CEO Scott Kirby says "this is the most optimistic I've been" about fixing FAA
📅 May 11, 2025Face the Nation10 MIN6094 VIEWS25 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
Amid major delays and outages at Newark Airport, United CEO Scott Kirby joins "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," who says he is "concerned that we have delays for customers because of the technology and short staffing at the FAA."
"Face the Nation" is America's premier Sunday morning public affairs program. The broadcast is one of the longest-running news programs in the history of television, having debuted Nov. 7, 1954, on CBS. Every Sunday, "Face the Nation" moderator and CBS News senior foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan welcomes leaders, newsmakers, and experts to a liv...
Questions asked in this interview
9
1:05How is that potentially affecting the schedule?
1:54Doesn't that potentially mean the cost of a ticket's going to go up?
We've just learned that there have now been three outages at Newark Liberty International Airport in recent weeks. The latest came overnight and caused a 45-minute ground stop. At this point, the FAA says that third episode was an equipment outage. We'll update you as we learn more. Now, Newark is a major hub for United Airlines. We spoke Saturday before this latest incident with the airline's CEO, Scott Kirby, and asked him, 'Is it safe to be flying in and out of Newark right now?'
It absolutely is safe at Newark and in the entire country. And the reason is when these kind of outages happen, we train for them. We have backup procedures. We have backups to backups to backups to keep this guy safe, which is always the number one priority. And in situations like this, when the radar outage happened at Newark, what happens is the pilots look for alternative frequencies. They go to alternative centers with alternative radars. And they also have a system in the airplane where they can see it's equivalent of radar. They can see their position in the air in the sky and all the other aircraft around them. But what we do is slow the whole system down, which is disruptive to customers, but it's entirely safe.
Newark is your biggest global gateway on the east coast. Given the problems there and the need as you've described them to slow things down, what other adjustments are you making to operations and especially with the travel season picking up into the summer? How is that potentially affecting the schedule?
Well, at United, our number one priority is safety, but number two is our customers. And in this case, what we've done is we've proactively reduced flights out of the schedule. The FAA is working with other airlines to do the same so that we can have the number of flights scheduled at the airport that the airport can accommodate. Pruning the number of flights just creates more space at the airport, allows the airport to operate effectively. There's also runway construction going on that'll be over June 15th. That's going to double the capacity of the airport when that happens.
Well, if you're pruning the schedule, then that means less supply with increasing demand going into the summer. Doesn't that potentially mean the cost of a ticket's going to go up?
My guess is if you look at the ticket prices flying out of New York right now, that in fact is not what is happening. There's less demand because there's concerns about safety. And so what we've also done is put bigger airplanes on the route. So put a larger airplane, have fewer flights, but with bigger airplanes to maintain the number of seats that we have flying in and out of New York. And air travel remains a pretty strong bargain across the country and around the globe and demand is strong and we look forward to carrying several hundred thousand customers a day every day this summer.
Well, and there is the broader issue of bigger picture of air travel and you just acknowledged that demand is down in part because people are concerned about safety with all the issues that have happened so far this year, but you've also got economic turmoil prompted by tariffs. There's lingering concerns about inflation. And you've said you can't predict how customers are going to be spending their money going forward. So, I mean, what is the potential negative impact on the travel industry through the rest of the year?
You know, the travel industry and United Airlines in particular, demand has been resilient. We saw a hit to demand beginning in February. Demand declined from what we were expecting it to be, but it stabilized into March and April and actually has gotten a little bit better in May. And so, everything I can see, we're a pretty good real-time indicator of the economy at United Airlines. Everything I can see is the consumer is cautious but still in pretty good shape.
You know, you talk about this world-class air traffic control system we have. You can control the aircraft. You can control the quality of the pilot you put on that aircraft to fly it. You can control the schedule, but you do not control who's in the tower and how many people are in the tower. So, you say it's a world-class air traffic control system. How can you assure passengers of that given all the issues we've seen especially this year with the FAA?
Well, we need to upgrade the system to actually make it world class. But the air traffic controllers are the best in the world. Incredible professionals and they keep the sky safe. And what happens when they're short-staffed or there's a technology issue, they slow the airspace down. Essentially, what they do is put more miles between airplanes. That gives them the ability to manage and handle it. It leads to customer impacts. We have to delay or cancel flights because there are more flights scheduled than can arrive, but it keeps the system safe and that's absolutely what they should do.
13 more exchanges in this transcript
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Kirby, S. (2025, May 11). United CEO Scott Kirby says "this is the most optimistic I've been" about fixing FAA [Interview transcript]. Face the Nation. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/830363/
MLA
Scott Kirby. "United CEO Scott Kirby says "this is the most optimistic I've been" about fixing FAA." Face the Nation, 11 May. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/830363/.
BibTeX
@misc{kirby2025_830363,
author = {Scott Kirby},
title = {United CEO Scott Kirby says "this is the most optimistic I've been" about fixing FAA},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Face the Nation. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/830363/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
