Remarks as prepared for delivery.
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today to discuss the NTSB: our needs, our challenges, and our critical safety mission.
Throughout a typical year, the NTSB works on about 2,200 domestic and 450 foreign cases, and we expect the number of cases annually to remain high and continue to increase in complexity.
Some investigations understandably get more public attention than others, but all our investigations are critical to improving safety.
I understand that Members of the Committee have a particular interest in our highest profile investigations, including the in-flight structural failure of a Boeing 737-9 and the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine.
These investigations are critically important, and I’m happy to answer as many of your questions as I can.
But I do want to emphasize that these investigations are ongoing; there’s still a lot of work to do to understand what led to these events, so I want to be careful not to undermine the work of our investigators.
Unlike the Alaska 1282 investigation, two dockets are open to the public on East Palestine. They contain over 6,400 pages of factual information, which I can discuss at length.
With that said, these are just two of 1,200 active NTSB investigations in 47 states and Puerto Rico, in addition to 140 foreign investigations in over 50 countries.
We owe it to the families of those involved, to the communities where events occurred, and to the traveling public to find out what happened in all these tragedies to prevent them from reoccurring.
That’s as true for Alaska 1282 as it is for the recent natural gas-fueled home explosions and fires in Mississippi that killed a woman in her home.
Or for the multivehicle crash, in Ohio, on November 14th of last year, which included a motorcoach carrying high school band members and killed six people.
Or for the hot air ballon accident in Arizona on January 14th that killed four.
Over the last year, the NTSB has completed many significant and complex investigations and issued safety recommendations to prevent these kinds of tragedies.
There are currently over a thousand open safety recommendations that we’ve made across every mode of transportation. In 2022 and 2023, we issued 159 new recommendations, and closed 261. Of those closed, 80 percent were closed acceptably, meaning that the recipient took action to implement the safety recommendation. This success rate demonstrates the value of our recommendations, and we appreciate the efforts of recipients to address them, even when it takes an Act of Congress to make it happen.
The NTSB is pleased that this committee has included provisions in FAA reauthorization to address a number of our recommendations, which I mentioned in my written testimony. That work will save lives, and we thank you for it.
We also appreciate the Committee’s efforts to reauthorize the NTSB as part of the FAA bill. That authorization expired at the end of FY22.
And we are incredibly grateful for the $140 million that was just provided to us in the FY24 appropriations bill that is before the House and Senate for consideration.
We are a small agency relative to our federal partners, both in terms of the size of our budget and our workforce.
But as the numbers show, our impact is profound and disproportionate. I like to say, we are a small agency with a big voice and everyone at the NTSB plays a critical role in achieving our mission to make transportation safer.
To continue as the world’s preeminent safety agency – the gold standard, if you will – and develop recommendations that advance safety change without delay - we need more resources.
Flat funding in the outyears as proposed in the Senate bill would, frankly, devastate our agency – in fact, it’s unprecedented – and reverse the progress made on enhancing and preparing our workforce for emerging challenges and improving the timeliness of our investigations.
As you work through conference, I strongly urge your continued support for the NTSB’s ability to carry out our critical safety mission – now and in the future.
Before I close, I mentioned loss earlier.
Loss is not new to the NTSB. We know all-too-well how fragile and precious life is, but when it hits home, it hits us hard and reminds us – once again – what’s truly important: our relationships with each other…families, friends, colleagues.
The NTSB is in mourning this week from the sudden death of our Director of Marine Safety, Captain Morgan Turrell.
Morgan began his career at NTSB in 2003 as a nautical operations investigator. He left in 2007 to serve as Vice President of Marine Investigations for Princess Cruises and returned to the NTSB in 2010.
In 2014, Morgan became chief of investigations in our Office of Marine Safety. Three years later, he was promoted to deputy director and then to director in 2021.
Morgan was a marine safety expert. He was a proud graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and served as a licensed deck officer, including Master, on a variety of commercial vessels, and he was an incredible advocate for improving safety on our waterways.
His last words to me on February 11th were, “I am surrounded by my family.”
We were so fortunate to be part of Morgan’s family. He was an incredible person; he was so kind, thoughtful; a mentor, a teacher, and a friend to so many of us at the NTSB, the United States Coast Guard, and the Merchant Marine Academy. He will be missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his mother, Catherine, father, Brian, and older brother, John. As a mom, I cannot imagine a greater loss than the loss of your child. Catherine told me yesterday that there will be – forever – a piece of her that is missing.
Thank you.
