Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come to the floor this morning to speak in opposition to the nomination of Steven Bradbury. He is nominated to be the Deputy Secretary of Transportation. When it comes to transportation safety, we don't measure success in dollars saved. We measure success in lives protected and tragedies prevented. Last week, I met with the parents of Sam Lilley, the first officer of the American Airlines plane that fatally collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter at DCA Airport. Sam's father happens to be a commercial pilot now, and before that, he flew Black Hawk helicopters in the military. He expressed his concern about reports that the Black Hawks are regularly being operated in this busy airspace without the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, commonly known as ADS-B, turned on. We know that the Black Hawk in the January 29 collision wasn't transmitting. We hope that we will find out later today in the NTSB report what we need to do to fix this problem. We know that during Mr. Bradbury's first tenure at DOT, he let the FAA create exemptions to permit military aircraft to operate without this key safety technology transmitting. And guess what? The military knew that they had been granted a loophole, but they said it would not be used all the time--only to find out later that the military said they were using the exemption 100 percent of the time. My heart goes out to the Lilley family and to all the families of the victims of this tragic accident.…”