[gavel] the committee will come to order. Today, our subcommittee is holding an oversight hearing on the federal aviation administration. Im very pleased to be joined by senator jack reed, the subcommittees Ranking Member, senator caputo is here right from the start, and im sure we will be joined by others. The faa is a 17 billion agency with 44,000 employees who are responsible for virtually every aspect of aviation in our country, including the safety of commercial airlines, general aviation, and cargo aircraft. Every day, faas air Traffic Controllers are responsible for more than 44,000 flights and 2. 7 Million Airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace. Over the last year, muchneeded attention has been focused on the crashes of lion air flight 610 and Ethiopian Air flight 302. Serious questions have been raised about the effectiveness of the faas regulatory framework. For the sake of the 346 victims and their families, we need to ensure that these accid