STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The political power shift in Congress has implications for air travel. The incoming Democratic majority could push for tougher oversight of airlines, and the travel industry is trying to prepare for the possibility of another government shutdown. NPR's Joel Rose covers transportation and flew in for this face-to-face. Hi there, Joel.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Hey, Steve. Hi.
INSKEEP: OK. So what does divided government, which is what we're going to have, mean for air travel?
ROSE: Well, I've been talking to people in the industry about this, and they say there is a lot we just cannot predict about the next two years. I talked to Geoff Freeman. He's the CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, the big industry trade group in Washington. He says the most challenging part of this environment is the unpredictability.
GEOFF FREEMAN: How Democrats are going to try to assert more control, how a president who is in the final two years of his time in office - how he's going to react to that. And the unpredictability certainly has us in the mindset of buckle up.
ROSE: You buckled up, Steve?
INSKEEP: Absolutely.
ROSE: In particular, Freeman sounds concerned about the possibility of a government shutdown. Remember that we had three partial government shutdowns in the first two years of the Trump administration. And that meant that TSA officers and air traffic controllers sometimes did not get paid. Many of them called out sick, took on second jobs to pay their bills, leading in some places to hourslong security lines, in other places to delayed and canceled flights. And that was when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress. Freeman says divided government makes another shutdown like that even more likely.
INSKEEP: OK. Yeah. We still have a president who prides himself on being unpredictable and is in a new situation. But to the extent that Democrats are able to set the agenda, what do they want to do?
ROSE: Well, Democrats talked a lot about affordability during the campaign, and some are concerned about how airlines set their prices. In particular, they've been asking questions about what consumer advocates call surveillance pricing, where companies use customers' private data to personalize the price based...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
ROSE: ...On what they think we might be willing to pay. The industry does use sophisticated algorithms to set ticket prices, but airlines deny that what they are doing is surveillance pricing. I talked to Chris Sununu, the head of Airlines for America, an industry trade group that represents the biggest airlines. Here is some of what Sununu said.
CHRIS SUNUNU: If you're worried about affordability, the last thing they should be doing is piling unnecessary regulation specifically - I'm going to advocate - onto the airline industry that is already, far and away, one of the most regulated industries. Every regulation has a cost. And that goes to the consumer.
ROSE: Sununu said the airlines are also struggling right now with high fuel prices - the price of jet fuel, you know, roughly double what it was a year ago before the war in Iran. But he says there is not that much that the incoming Congress can do to bring fuel costs down, at least not in the short run.
INSKEEP: OK. Could the airlines get any safer?
ROSE: Yeah. There was a big bipartisan push for new safety regulations after the midair collision in Washington, D.C. last year. This was a crash involving the American Airlines passenger jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
ROSE: The Senate passed a bill that would require wider use of a safety system that investigators say could have prevented that crash. But the bill stalled in the House, where it came up just a few votes short after the Pentagon pulled its support at the last minute. I talked this week to Doug Lane, who lost his wife and son in that collision. He says the families of the victims are pushing for another vote during the lame-duck session.
DOUG LANE: We've just been laser-focused on trying to get it done this year, you know, regardless of what happens, because I think we just see having a new Congress come in just as something that's going to introduce delay.
ROSE: Lane says that the family members want to see a compromise bill that could pass both the House and the Senate, and they will be back in Washington next week to push for it.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Joel Rose. Thanks so much.
ROSE: Thanks, Steve.
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