- President Trump named an interim replacement for the vacant position of FAA administrator, following the catastrophe of Flight 5342. The previous leader resigned a day before Trump’s inauguration, after Elon Musk demanded his head for grounding SpaceX multiple times.
President Donald Trump named Chris Rocheleau, chief of operations at the lobby group National Business Aviation Association, as interim FAA administrator on Thursday, one day after a midair collision between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter near Washington D.C., left 67 dead.
The government agency had been leaderless since its previous head, Mike Whitaker, resigned one day prior to Trump taking office, having earned the enmity of the president’s ally, Elon Musk.
Whitaker wasn’t the only high-profile regulator to leave a hole in the top ranks of the Federal Aviation Administration. As of press time four other leadership posts are currently staffed with acting appointees alongside Rocheleau, and another six remain vacant, including the deputy administrator.
The National Transportation Safety Board will lead the inquiry into the accident in which a U.S. Army helicopter collided with American Eagle Flight 5342 on its approach to Reagan National Airport, leaving no survivors in the country’s first deadly midair collision in over a decade. The Federal Aviation Administration traditionally investigates aircraft incidents, fatal or not.
Fortune has reached out to the FAA requesting comment.
Former FAA administrator repeatedly grounded SpaceX launches
As a regulator tasked with ensuring air safety, Whitaker had made a powerful enemy in Musk by repeatedly interfering in the CEO’s launch schedule for his company SpaceX.
The most recent grounding came a day after the seventh live test of Musk’s Starship resulted in the upper stage of the rocket exploding 90 miles above sea level, showering the earth with dangerous debris that forced aircraft below to reroute.
But Musk’s acrimony stretched back much further than that.
He needs to resign https://t.co/pG8htfTYHb
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2024
In April 2023, Whitaker grounded SpaceX for months after Starship’s maiden launch and only allowed a second attempt after an extensive investigation lasting until September of that year yielded 63 corrective actions to be taken.
“He needs to resign,” Musk wrote late last year, in response to one of his fans criticizing what he believed to be the FAA’s unwarranted meddling in the entrepreneur’s affairs.
Musk justified his endorsement of Trump in part by arguing for humanity’s need to colonize Mars, a goal that he believes can only be achieved if SpaceX is free to act broadly.
Trump alleges air traffic controllers suffer from ‘severe’ intellectual disabilities
While the NTSB is only beginning to investigate the cause of the midair collision, in a news briefing on Thursday Trump claimed the crash was likely a result of the FAA allegedly hiring Americans with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” to become air traffic controllers as part of a deliberate departmental policy.
When pressed by reporters to explain how he came to that conclusion given the investigation has only just begun, the president replied: “Because I have common sense, okay?”
It is an argument Trump uses frequently. When he nominated former congressman and Fox News personality Sean Duffy to run the Transportation Department, he brought up that same issue. “He will make our skies safe again by eliminating DEI for pilots and air traffic controllers,” Trump said in November, predicting a “golden age of travel.”
Just hours before the Flight 5342 tragedy occurred, Duffy began rolling back DEI as part of what he called a “Woke Rescission” memo.
