Bridget Grumet: Grieving families, frustrated congressman wonder why aviation safety rule still isn't in place

We’ve all heard the expression: It would take an act of Congress to accomplish some incredibly difficult task. Except in this case, Congress has acted. Nearly four years ago. Heck, Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, polar opposites in their politics and temperaments, were on the same page in championing this measure. And we’re talking about a matter of public safety, life and death. Yet the rule in question — requiring commercial hot air balloon pilots to undergo annual medical screenings, a basic safeguard that might have prevented the 2016 Lockhart balloon crash that killed 16 people — is stuck in a bureaucratic maze. Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to adopt such a rule by the spring of 2019. We’re still waiting. In the federal government, “delay is certainly not unusual. Some degree of (bureaucratic) indifference is certainly not unusual,” said Doggett, who has been a congressman for nearly three decades.

“But this goes far and beyond anything I've ever seen in my entire career, in terms of an agency being directed to do something and ignoring the direction.” “It is words like appalling, outrageous, astounding that have characterized my view about something that has been going on for so long,” Doggett added. Perhaps you’re thinking: Hot air balloon regulations are not exactly a front-burner issue for most Americans. The FAA estimates the rule will affect roughly 350 pilots who provide hot air balloon rides to paying customers. (The rule won't affect balloonists who fly for their own enjoyment.) But we’re also talking about the federal response to the deadliest hot air balloon crash in U.S. history, a wholly avoidable tragedy that devastated families. And we’re talking about Congress plainly directing a federal agency to do a specific thing by a specific deadline in the name of consumer safety … and that thing hasn’t happened. As the American-Statesman first reported in the aftermath of the Lockhart crash, the National Transportation Safety Board had tried for years to get the FAA to beef up its regulation of the hot air balloon industry. In 2014, the NTSB had even predicted a “high number of fatalities in a single air tour balloon accident” if the FAA didn’t improve oversight.