AAAE Staff

Please contact your Representative today and ask your elected official to sign a letter requesting full funding for the FAA Contract Tower Program in the FY27 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill.  

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is planning to mark up a modified aviation safety bill next week, and we expect that it will include a variation of the PAPA Act.

House T&I Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) recently announced that the committee plans to consider broad aviation safety legislation known as the ALERT Act next week.

Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT) and three other senators today introduced a bipartisan bill that would require the FAA to equip contract towers with Airborne Position Reference Tools unless they already have similar technology in place.

The House of Representatives this afternoon failed to provide the two-thirds majority needed to approve the Senate-passed ROTOR Act.

The bipartisan leadership of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Armed Services Committee have released the text of their broad aviation safety bill, known as the Airspace Location and Enhanced Risk Transparency (ALERT) Act.

This is a reminder that the deadline for contract tower airports with sponsor-owned towers to submit their applications for funding from the Fiscal Year 2026 FAA Contract Tower (FCT) Competitive Grant Program is February 17, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time. 

After narrowly clearing a procedural hurdle, the House of Representatives on, a vote of 217 to 214, has just passed a consolidated appropriations measure that provides funding through September for DOT/FAA as well as the Departments of Defense, State, Labor, Education, Housing, and others covered by five of the final six FY26 funding bills.

As we reported previously, the House last week passed the final four FY26 funding bills – including DOT/FAA, DHS/TSA/CBP, Defense, and Labor-HHS – and packaged them together with two other previously approved measures for the Senate to consider this week.

The U.S. Contract Tower Association today participated in a roundtable discussion on air traffic control modernization headed by House Aviation Subcommittee Chair Troy Nehls (R-TX).