James Oberstar: “I have got my seat belt in place, tray table is up, waiting for a real conference. The points the gentleman from Florida…”

“I have got my seat belt in place, tray table is up, waiting for a real conference. The points the gentleman from Florida raised are the kinds of issues that we should be discussing in the conference. We did not have that kind of discussion before, and if you go back to the report of the Inspector General and, as verified by, as reviewed further by GAO, you find that the selection of air traffic control towers was arbitrary, did not follow a consistent pattern, was flawed in the number of towers selected. Furthermore, there are 63 million operations a year run by our FAA control towers. The contract towers handle a fraction of that amount, and they handle different kinds of traffic. And those are the kinds of issues I say to my good friend, the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) that we should be discussing in the House-Senate conference. That is where we ought to have that debate, not here in 1-minute sound bites.”