Video: FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt was placed on a leave of absence Monday as Department of Transportation officials decide how to handle his arrest on charges of drunken driving. (Dec. 5)
Federal Aviation Administration head Randy Babbitt was placed on administrative leave and appeared at risk of losing his job Monday after being arrested on a drunken-driving charge Saturday night in Fairfax City.
Transportation Department officials were “in discussions with legal counsel about Administrator Babbitt’s employment status” after being taken by surprise when Fairfax City police released news of the arrest Monday morning, according to a statement.
(Mark Gail/WASHINGTON POST) - FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt
Babbitt’s boss, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a passionate safety advocate who has embraced campaigns against drunken driving, had no immediate public comment. LaHood was meeting with senior officials to discuss Babbitt’s future with the FAA. White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Obama “didn’t have a particular reaction” to the news and learned of it about the same time as other officials did.
Babbitt’s arrest presented a new twist for an agency struggling to right itself to tackle the most ambitious project in aviation history — a $40 billion guidance system based on the Global Positioning System — after a series of embarrassing stumbles.
The most public of them were incidents in which air traffic controllers were caught sleeping on the job, more than once requiring pilots to land jetliners virtually on their own. Another was a mistake by a controller who allowed first lady Michelle Obama’s plane to stray too close to a military plane on approach to Andrews Air Force Base.
The same controller was responsible for an earlier near-collision near Washington involving a plane carrying Rep. James F. Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), underscoring a significant increase in the number of mistakes by controllers nationwide.
Babbitt, 65, was pulled over about 10:30 p.m. Saturday by an officer who saw him driving alone on the wrong side of the road on Old Lee Highway, a four-lane thoroughfare about nine miles from his Reston home, police said.
He was cooperative and was released without bail from the Adult Detention Center, authorities said. Police did not release Babbitt’s blood alcohol level, but .08 is the threshold to bring charges of driving while intoxicated in Virginia. Babbitt could not be reached for comment Monday. He is scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 2.
Carney said Babbitt requested a leave of absence and “LaHood accepted that request. ”
Kurt Erickson, president of the Washington Regional Alcohol Program, an area nonprofit group that fights drunken driving, cited the first admonition in the FAA mission statement — “safety is our passion” — in rebuking Babbitt’s alleged conduct.
“If found guilty, it’s incongruous and criminal,” Erickson said. “What distinguishes this case is that it involved the head of a federal transportation safety agency. Otherwise it is, unfortunately, undistinguished amongst the nearly 16,000 annual DUI arrests in the Washington area every year.”
Erickson said the most common DUI arrest is that of a man driving at night on a weekend.
Jan Withers, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said drunk drivers should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law without regard to their status. “We get disappointed when our leaders do something like this,” Withers said.
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