Congress delegated the authority to the FAA because (in concept) the agency is staffed by people who are knowledgeable about aviation, and are better equipped to make smarter aviation related decisions.
For Congress to override the FAA you'd need some majority, in both houses, willing to make a technical decision which is directly related to airplane safety. That would require enormous amounts of time to educate Congress people, time which Congress has no interest in providing.
They created the FAA specifically to remove all aviation issues from their docket. They are not now going to medle with this one issue - that's not how the system works.
Obviously, like all good govt beaurocracies the FAA has grown big and slow and cautious and so everything takes forever. They are pretty much incentivized to keep kicking the can down the road, it is quite literally their business model.
Ok, but, they have actually gotten directly involved in aviation matters in very specific terms, and they do so regularly. This isn't theoretical and I'm not hypothesizing; they've actually done it, a lot. Usually it's to tell Aeromedical to knock it off (a famously dysfunctional division), and a few years ago Congress ordered the FAA to make a whole separate medical track that routes around the FAA almost completely. So it wouldn't surprise me at all to see them step in here. You'd be surprised how many people in Congress are pilots and are quite happy to tell the FAA where to stick it.
Congress delegated the authority to the FAA because (in concept) the agency is staffed by people who are knowledgeable about aviation, and are better equipped to make smarter aviation related decisions.
For Congress to override the FAA you'd need some majority, in both houses, willing to make a technical decision which is directly related to airplane safety. That would require enormous amounts of time to educate Congress people, time which Congress has no interest in providing.
They created the FAA specifically to remove all aviation issues from their docket. They are not now going to medle with this one issue - that's not how the system works.
Obviously, like all good govt beaurocracies the FAA has grown big and slow and cautious and so everything takes forever. They are pretty much incentivized to keep kicking the can down the road, it is quite literally their business model.
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