Aviation and surface-transport regulators

Summary

The aviation and surface-transportation authorities issued a continuous body of force-of-law instruments from March 2020 through September 30, 2021 that limited travel and commerce for every employer that moved people or goods, sold to travelers, or depended on a commuting workforce. In the run-up and the second quarter of 2020 the Federal Aviation Administration waived the slot-usage requirement at JFK, LaGuardia and Reagan National so that carriers could cancel schedules without penalty (85 FR 15018, Mar. 16, 2020; extended Apr. 17, 2020 to Oct. 24, 2020), suspended enforcement of medical-certificate expirations (85 FR 18110), reduced control-tower operating hours at some ninety airports, and adopted SFAR 118 (85 FR 26326, effective Apr. 30, 2020), a legislative rule reciting that stay-at-home orders had made training, testing and medical facilities unavailable to airmen. The Department of Transportation fixed the national airline network by order: Order 2020-3-10 (Mar. 31, 2020) and the Final Order 2020-4-2 (Apr. 7, 2020) required every carrier accepting CARES Act assistance to serve every point it served before March 1, 2020 at reduced federal minimum frequencies through September 30, 2020, while the May 12 notice and Orders 2020-5-5 and 2020-6-2 authorized suspensions of service to named cities; the Essential Air Service notice of Apr. 29, 2020 authorized reduced small-community service retroactive to March 1, 2020; the aviation enforcement notices of Mar. 2, Apr. 3 and May 12, 2020 governed carriers' boarding refusals and refund duties in the face of mass cancellations; Orders 2020-6-1 and 2020-6-6 (June 2020) suspended and then capped Chinese carriers' passenger service at four weekly round trips, and Order 2020-6-13 conditioned Air India's charters. The Federal Railroad Administration declared an emergency situation on March 13, 2020 (docket FRA-2020-0002), issued Safety Advisory 2020-01 (Apr. 10, 2020), and the Department's drug-and-alcohol-testing office suspended in-person evaluation and requalification requirements for every DOT-regulated employer from April 4, 2020. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission stopped accepting cash at every interchange at 8 p.m. on March 16, 2020 and closed and then reopened its seventeen service plazas on a take-out-only basis (Mar. 17-20, 2020); the New York State Thruway Authority converted cash tolls to license-plate billing from March 22 to June 3, 2020. The Port of Seattle barred tenant evictions and deferred rents (Apr. 1, 2020), suspended twenty construction projects pending COVID-19 site safety plans (Apr. 9-13, 2020), and required face coverings of every worker, visitor and passenger at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport from May 18, 2020; the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority required masks of all 22,000 badged airport employees from June 17, 2020. The MBTA cut service from March 17, 2020, discouraged all non-essential travel, ran Saturday bus schedules from April 6, and required face coverings from May 6, 2020; Amtrak cut the Northeast Corridor to 40 percent of normal service (Mar. 21, 2020), ran an Essential Service Plan (Apr. 6, 2020), required face coverings and capped ticket sales from May 11, 2020. In the third and fourth quarters of 2020 the FAA extended SFAR 118 (June 29 and Oct. 6, 2020) and the slot waiver through Mar. 27, 2021 (85 FR 63335), and extended the cargo-in-passenger-cabin exemptions; DOT's service obligations ran to September 30, 2020; the Pennsylvania Turnpike made its cash suspension permanent in June 2020; Amtrak cut long-distance routes to three days a week from October 1, 2020; the MBTA resumed front-door boarding on July 20, 2020 and in December 2020 approved Commuter Rail cuts effective January 23, 2021. In the first and second quarters of 2021 Congress and DOT re-imposed minimum-service obligations (Order 2021-1-5, Jan. 15, 2021, through Mar. 31, 2021; Order 2021-4-13, Apr. 29, 2021, through Sept. 30, 2021), the DOT Workplace Safety Plan (Feb. 19, 2021, updated June 25, 2021) put the Department and the FAA on maximum telework with masks and occupancy limits, the FRA's Emergency Order No. 32 (effective Mar. 1, 2021) required masks of every railroad employee and contractor in every yard, shop and terminal on pain of civil penalties of up to $118,826 a day, the Department's mask enforcement notice of Feb. 5, 2021 implemented the federal aircraft mask mandate, and the ODAPC enforcement-discretion statement was extended to Dec. 31, 2021. On July 1, 2021 the following were in force: DOT Order 2021-4-13 (minimum air service through Sept. 30, 2021); the FAA's Summer 2021 slot relief through Oct. 30, 2021; FAA Exemptions 18584 and, from July 9, 18561B and 18584A (cargo in cabins to Dec. 31, 2021); FRA Emergency Order No. 32 as modified June 10, 2021; the FRA's March 13, 2020 emergency declaration and 2021 emergency relief docket; the DOT Workplace Safety Plan (June 25, 2021); the ODAPC statement (to Dec. 31, 2021); the transit mask rules of the MBTA, MTA and Amtrak under the federal conveyance orders; the Pennsylvania Turnpike's all-electronic tolling; the Port of Seattle and GOAA airport mask rules. During the quarter the FAA proposed on Sept. 16, 2021 to extend COVID-19 slot relief through Mar. 26, 2022 (86 FR 52114), DOT issued Acquisition Directive 2021-02 (Sept. 17, 2021) requiring vaccination attestation or testing of every on-site contractor employee, and the MTA reminded riders on Sept. 7 and stepped up $50-fine mask enforcement on Sept. 23, 2021 while placing its 67,000 employees under a vaccination-or-weekly-testing mandate from Labor Day. Every one of these was an order from an authority with statutory power over the commerce, travel or gatherings it limited, and every one reached employers far beyond the transportation sector: airport concessionaires and contractors, hotels and travel agencies, freight shippers and rail-served plants, motor carriers and their drivers, and every employer whose workforce commuted by transit.