I guess the fundamental question in the discussion over Republic Airways CEO Bryan Bedford’s nomination as FAA Administrator is when a mistake (if, indeed, it was a mistake) becomes a lie when left uncorrected. Unfortunately, it would seem like Bedford isn’t very interested in peeling apart those layers and will instead follow a political playbook that, at best, counsels its adherents to ignore the uncomfortable questions from a minority because the majority doesn’t really care. And, for the sake of political expedience, that minority is being challenged to look the other way, which may become Bedford’s biggest challenge.
When news of Bedford’s nomination began circulating a few months ago, he seemed like a pick that could at least speak to the myriad challenges facing aviation. Running a regional airline over the past 20 years actually sounds like a special kind of hell to me and I would assume his days were packed with the kinds of existential crises that would be a good primer for the top job at the FAA, which sounds like an extra special kind of hell.
High-profile nominees like this have, in the past at least, gone through the kind of rigorous background checks that are designed to uncover even the slightest miscue on matters of character, policy direction and general behavior that might give opponents to his nomination potentially embarrassing fodder during the Senate nomination process. Bedford lit up the board with lights, sirens and air horns. Republic’s formal request, while Bedford was CEO, to the FAA a few years ago to cut in half the 1500-hour rule for graduates of the purpose-built regional airline training academy at Republic seemed like a reasonable idea to me. It did not, however, sit well with the bipartisan collection of Congress people representing Buffalo, New York, where a Colgan Airlines Dash-8 stalled and spun into a suburban house in 2009.
Many of those government representatives were behind the congressional order to require anyone applying for an ATP to have a minimum of 1500 hours, although it didn’t specify the kind of flying experience. With 15 years of data to mine, it might be time to see if the controversial measure had any impact on flight safety, and I suspect we will get that chance with Bedford in charge. But that’s not what this nomination process will be about, at least in my mind.
It seems inconceivable to me that the administration’s vetting process did not pick up the false assertion in his company bio that he had a commercial pilot certificate. It’s also inconceivable that Bedford wasn’t entirely responsible for that false assertion. Hands up anyone who has had to submit a bio for work or any other endeavor that you haven’t either written yourself or approved before it was published. Let’s also see a show of hands for those who believe Bedford doesn’t know the difference between having a commercial ticket and not having one.
In normal times, the due diligence discovery by Politico would have prompted an immediate response, a formal correction and heartfelt apology, and that would have been it. But instead of admitting to what could have been characterized as an error at the time, Bedford and the administration dug in. Legitimate requests for clarification were stonewalled and the administration, via the Department of Transportation, instead spun it up into full-scale battle with the fake news who inevitably earn that status when they publish truthful information that causes it embarrassment.
The irony here is that the FAA demands nothing but absolute truth from those whose privileges and livelihoods depend on faultless adherence to its regulations and policies. Never, ever lying about anything is the bedrock of their interaction with the agency. One uncorrected error, misrepresentation or outright lie can utterly destroy the career of any of the hundreds of thousands who hold FAA certificates, and the agency is ruthless in its pursuit and prosecution of those who commit that highest of crimes. Anyone who claimed to be a commercial pilot without actually being one could rightfully expect the full wrath.
But it looks like the guy who will set the standard for all of those who fly, fix, design and build airplanes will skate on this transgression at a time when the FAA can least afford that kind of sloppiness. As we reported last week, Bedford has, in written comments to the Senate Commerce Committee, confirmed that he is not a commercial pilot, something anyone could have found out for themselves with a few mouse clicks. He did not, however, take any responsibility for it and seemed to dismiss it as a minor faux pas that could have happened to anyone. Here’s the exchange. Read it yourself and tell me I’m wrong.
Mr. Bedford, you said “transparency” is one of the top challenges facing the FAA. We absolutely need a leader at the agency who is transparent and does not misrepresent the facts. I am concerned, however, that you have not always been fully candid about your background. For years, the biography on your company’s website represented that you hold “commercial” pilot ratings. It said this as recently as December 2024. But now that you have been nominated to lead FAA, this credential has been scrubbed from your online biography.
Question 1: Mr. Bedford, you do not currently hold commercial pilot ratings, correct?
Response: It is true I fully completed all my commercial flight training, including the FAA written exam and FAA oral exam. However, due to weather, I was unable to complete my FAA check ride before switching jobs, and therefore did not formally obtain my commercial flight license.
Question 2: You never held commercial pilot ratings, correct?
Response: Correct.
Question 3: But as recently as October 2019, you indicated during remarks at Liberty University that you had commercial pilot ratings, stating: “Between like, 1994-1997, I went through private, instrument, multi-engine, commercial, and by the time we got to our next labor negotiation three years later, I had all my ratings.” Why did you claim to have commercial pilot ratings at this time?
Response: Context is important in this setting. I was simply trying to relate to these students my appreciation for their achievements based on my own extensive flight training experience. I still fly, as a pilot, on a regular basis.
The very least I would have expected in this almost-cordial exchange would be some kind of acceptance of responsibility for the lengthy delusion of his flight credentials. We all know how big a difference there is between a private and a commercial certificate, and the fact that he did part of the work toward getting the higher classification is of little comfort. Instead, he seemed to be trying to see what he could get away with.
The tragedy is that the nomination of this fundamentally flawed candidate comes as the FAA is fighting (or should be fighting) to reclaim its position as the authority of record on all things aviation. Regulatory agencies around the world have traditionally adopted FAA standards as their own in the belief that those standards represent the best that any could conceive and achieve. Experience with the MAX, the deterioration of ATC and a few nasty incidents in the past couple of years have tarnished that reputation and a spectacle like this does not inspire confidence that improvement is on the way.
Bedford, and Bedford alone, can at least partially fix this. The credentials issue will come up again in the hearings before the full Senate. A full acceptance of responsibility, a promise to never let it happen again and an abject apology would go some way toward repairing the reputational insults he has self-inflicted.
Well written and absolutely spot on. He lied on multiple occasions and when discovered, the very people who officially nominated him for the position of FAA Administrator should have immediately withdrawn his name and kicked him to the curb. Personally I think it would be appropriate for you to make the names of the Senate Subcommittee who pushed him through known in this forum so that each and every reader can see exactly who was and is willing to settle for a consummate liar to head the FAA. They too are compromised and now living the same lie through their nominee AND expect the rest of us to settle for their pitiful performance.
I agree Russ. Especially, as you point out, because the FAA has zero mercy on pilots who don’t tell the truth. The Administrator would be in the position of “do as I say, not as I do.” No more hypocrites in top government jobs please. We’ve got enough already.
If you have watched any of the hearings on almost any topic in which anyone connected with this administration has been asked a hard question, you can predict with 99.9% certainty how Mr. Bedford will answer this question in the full Senate hearing. He will try to avoid answering, he will avoid responsibility for the answer, and in the end, we will have yet another person in a critical role in our government who is unfit to occupy it. SSDD.
Great commentary/ editorial Russ. It is hard not to agree with your key points. A few of the comments posted here appear to deflect attention and blame from the candidate Bedford, which weakens your point that he alone is responsible for his gross misrepresentation, by shifting blame to either Senate Republicans or the Trump administration. THEY are career politicians working in a sausage factory whose job it is to craft policy by swaying public opinion. I think your main point is the FAA administrator needs to be held to a higher standard because lives are directly at stake.
Bryan Bedford can be counted upon to accomplish several items if confirmed:
If I mis-stated things like this on my pilot application the FAA would revoke my license. mmmm.
That said, as a former Business Express pilot I can unequivocally state that Bryan is in it for Bryan. He will put airlines (and their profits) above pilots or safety.
“It seems inconceivable to me that the administration’s vetting process . . .” Why on earth would you think this administration has a vetting process?
Not telling the truth is disqualifying. Obscuring the truth is disqualifying. As pilots we are held to a high standard when sitting before an examiner or even when filling out forms. I remember being told by my instrument instructor that if even one number is not legible, they are going to disqualify the application…“so write LEGIBLY”.. Examiners are trained to be sticklers for accuracy. Mr Bedford has proven to me what he is made of. Will Bryan Bedford ever feel comfortable giving a talk in front of pilots?
Spot on, Russ. Thank you for writing and publishing this.
The 1500 hour rule was dreamed up as a “do-something” response to a tragic accident that was in no way related to the flight experience of the pilots. It placated the families of the victims who had lawyered up sufficiently to probably win a huge suit against the FAA for lack of overbite. FAR117 on the other hand was a response to the same accident and it was a handout to the airlines cloaked as providing more rest. It was a colossal whitewash, but the families went along with it to get the 1500 hour rule. Military training exemptions allow a 50% discount from the 1500 hour requirement. Military training is good but it’s not 100% better. And depending on the type of aircraft, it might have very little crossover to flying a commercial transport. And, both the Ace and the guy who barely scraped by get the same exemption.
The 1500 hour rule needs to go away as a blanket requirement, or lift the commercial pilot minimum flight time to 1500 hours if it’s truly a safety rule. Flight training in the US needs to be brought out of the 1950s and utilize the excellent simulator capabilities available today. Much better situational awareness and judgement could be taught in simulators rather than 1000 touch and goes in an Archer.
Pilot retirement age should probably be ditched as well as long as medical and recurrent flight training and check standards are upgraded as well. Pilots will make the choice to avoid being washed out by pulling their own ripcord when they see the time has come.
The FAA has long needed a major overhaul and more accountability. Instead, they hire this chump. Again, profit will stay ahead of safety, customer service, and tax payer fund productivity.
Nobody (in the government) really wants anything connected with/to the FAA to change - they simply don’t care. Don’t expect change or progress.
Most of the commenters are right on with their thoughts. A long time ago (late in the last century), I was at DCA for my semi-annual Cessna Citation Recurrent Training. I was there a day early, so I was asked to fly as short mission as Second-in-Command (yes, I was current). The PIC was the FAA Administrator. I asked to see his Pilot Certificate and found his Temporary Cert had expired several months earlier. An easy fix - I gave him a new Temp Cert, after confirming the information with OKC. This particular Administrator was imminently qualified to fly the mission, but not with an expired Cert. Now, how does this compare to a man who has no Commercial Pilot Certificate, and has lied about having had one for several years?
This whole affair reminds me of a very old quote… that has many modern derivatives. Here is mine…
"We [FAA professionals] the neglected, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”
/1/ Original version of this quote the unwilling from Konstantin Josef Jireček - Czech historian, politician, diplomat**//
/2/ FAA professionals are NOT the unwilling… as per the original quote… they have simply been the neglected for decades.
Meanwhile, pilots are taking webinars to make sure we correctly fill out line 322m on MedExpress because we’ll lose our medical if we get it wrong.
Maybe the United States could do better.
I don’t really get the huff n puff about future FAA Administrator Bedford. Within the current administration/ government are countless utterly unqualified people running a destructive shock and awe rampage campaign on the United States - and the rest of the world.
How utterly self-reflected must a character be, to type the words COMMERCIAL PILOT into a resume (or leave it there) even though no certificate was ever issued. Grotesque times we live in.
This is not an oversight.
Dig deeper and you may find more rotten fish.
Hmm. The alphabet groups, that is, AOPA, NBAA, EAA, NATA, HAI, and others, who initially supported Bryan Bedford’s nomination are now in a tricky spot. Good piece, Russ. Needed to be said.
Russ,
You hit it right on the nose with this article!
Raf,
Amazing how quiet all of those groups have been since that session with the subcommittee!
n8274k,
I respectfully disagree with you on the ATP rule. I have lost count of how many FO’s I have had who could not even fly a visual traffic pattern in a jet. If you don’t learn the basics how can you expect to learn advanced concepts like flying a transport category turbine airplane. The military has their own way of training, if you can’t learn at their pace you are out, plain and simple. In the civilian training world where the candidates are paying their own way it doesn’t work that way. Now if the airlines want to actually pay for candidates training, that’s different. Unfortunately the US airlines don’t want to do that. And they won’t as long as there are pilot candidates who are willing to pay their own way to an airline job.
The Bedford situation has some distant echoes in the Jack Pelton mess uncovered by 60 Minutes about twenty years ago. While the circumstances are different, and Pelton was not accused of lying, there are some similarities. Pelton at the time was CEO at Cessna. He has served as EAA chairman since 2012 and CEO since 2015.
Well, Russ, ya piqued my interest in Bedford’s qualifications to become Administrator, so I did my own due diligence before I answered the poll question elsewhere on Avweb.
Since 1958, there have been 19 Administrators; Bedford would be the 20th. I realized I’ve been a pilot during 16 of them. (Yikes!) I took the time to read the FAA Media bio’s on all of them. Then I looked up Bedford’s bio. He doesn’t look any better or worse than previous people who have warmed that chair up and – in fact – does have a fairly lengthy association with aviation. I can see where he’d seem qualified to do the job when comparing his background to the others. I think I see a propensity toward making decisions that would benefit the airlines but that’s about it. As to his lack of a commercial certificate … SO WHAT? At least he is a pilot. The vacating Administrator, Whitaker – a Biden appointee – only held a private certificate. Michael Huerta wasn’t a pilot at all. I doubt if he knew hot air comes out of a jet?
While I don’t disagree that Bedford shoulda cleaned up his bio, I don’t see it as a show stopper. Since you think the Administration could do better … let’s hear YOUR nomination preference? You hit the nail on the head when you said running the FAA is a ‘special sort of hell.’ That anyone would want the job surprises me.
If Bedford doesn’t take get or take the job, I’ll accept it … I’ll fix it. Lots of folks won’t like how I do it but I will fix it.
The issue here is about character, not about what rating you have. Bedford, by continuing to lie about having a commercial rating, shows all of us he lacks the proper character necessary to hold the position of FAA Administrator…
I met and had an interesting discussion with Bryan Bedford at an RAA convention. Before that discussion took place I introduced myself as an FAA Air Carrier Operations Inspector 1825 currently serving as a Principal Operations Inspector of a 14 CFR Part 121 regional carrier. Mr. Bedford lectured me on how FAA was dragging its heels on granting an exemption/waiver to the “1500 hour rule” and mistakenly compared Republic’s flight academy equal to military Undergraduate Pilot Training. As a former military trained aviator, retired major air carrier Captain and now FAA Inspector I just let him run amok. The other two Inspectors that were in attendance came to the same conclusion and it wasn’t complimentary
I shared this information with every Senator on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee who conducted his nomination/confirmation hearing. To a person I received no responses.
I fly with many military pilots who fall behind a highly automated, but not especially difficult aircraft to fly. After their hitch is up, they are many years removed from primary training with a disproportionately low total time. Why should 750 hours be sufficient for them? And why the current push towards mentoring? There is a bell curve to everything and military pilot training and qualification is no exception. As one military pilot reminded me, “ If the minimum wasn’t good enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum!” And don’t think for a moment that I have anything against those who stood up to bravely serve. My beef is with an arbitrary time requirement that allows a safety chasm between 250hrs and 1500hrs. By your own admission, 1500 is insufficient for some pilots and they should be washed out. But others with more pertinent experience in Part 135 two crew ops and turbine operation get no recognition for the quality of their experience.
Thanks for posting the names. I too have attempted to contact some of the members of the subcommittee- no response - and this my friends is the problem.
A CPL is very important to a pilot who uses it to make a living.For a person earning a living in another area,a pilots licence,plus ratings,etc is problay a fun hobby,but the individual relevance problay on a different level
Russ, nicely done.
This one’s got more bite than usual, a welcome change. Direct, clear, and not afraid to call it like it is. Maybe it’s just long-overdue frustration coming through, or maybe you’re saying what a lot of us have been thinking for a while. Either way, you nailed it.
Really can’t accept that he is not responsible for “mistakes” on his resume. If he’s willing to bend the truth for purposes of self promotion this isn’t the right role.
Well spoken Russ and thank you for saying what needed to be said. The unfortunate truth in this era is that the willingness and ability to lie with a straight face is a prime qualification for the job.
Well … revisiting the subject and reading MoMule’s comments, it appears that HIS opinion is the moist poignant here. He wins the comments IMHO. It also mirrors my previous comment where I thought Bedford might ‘favor’ the airlines in decisionmaking based upon my review of his full bio. OK … Bedford gets my “no.” That said, the discussion of his not correcting what level of pilot certificate he possesses is irrelevant and immaterial.
In fairness to AOPA, when they endorsed Bryan Bedford in March 2025, they described him as “an instrument-rated private pilot with a multi-engine rating.” No mention of a commercial certificate—because there wasn’t one in the FAA’s records.
The controversy over the incomplete commercial checkride, that he passed the written and oral but never completed the flight test didn’t surface publicly until June via POLITICO. AOPA likely checked the FAA Airmen Certification database, saw what he actually held, and stuck to the facts. But no one else seemed to catch the discrepancy.
Certificate, not rating.
I agree with the rest.
He will work for Duffy and Trump so any qualification beyond the willingness to follow blindly and shut up is a net negative.
I’m asking my two senators to vote no on him, for lying and being for the 750 hour FOs .
Why does this nomination mandate any more scrutiny than those who have already been been placed in high level administrative/Cabinet positions in this administration? Just adding another clown to the circus…
Worth mentioning the issue that military pilots are exempt from PIC requirements to get an ATP, and for many their only time actually being in charge of an aircraft is their 5-10 hours of solo.
“Lights, sirens, and air horns” sounds about right, but somebody has to care before it matters. To anyone concerned that the Senate is making a mistake by confirming this guy, I offer walking health hazard Robert Kennedy, cheerfully put in office by the same bunch. Qualifications and honesty are no longer required, and actually seem to be discouraged.