Federal Aviation Administrator Mike Whitaker announced yesterday that he will resign from office on January 20, 2025. Since Deputy Administrator Katie Thomson will be leaving on January 10, Whitaker said that Assistant Administrator for Finance and Management will serve as Acting Deputy Administrator and would then become Acting Administrator unless and until the new President installs someone else.

In an email to FAA employees, Whitaker congratulated them on their accomplishments together but added “you have important work that must continue – managing air traffic across the country, making sure aircraft are safe, integrating new entrants, and planning for the future of aerospace.”

Whitaker’s departure on the last day of the term of the President who appointed him, despite only having served a little over one year of a fixed five-year term, appears to be the end of the 30-year experiment in insulating the FAA Administrator from electoral politics.

Section 201 of the 1994 FAA authorization law provided that, instead of simply serving at the pleasure of the President, as all other DOT appointees save the Inspector General do, the term of office for all future FAA Administrators would be five years. During House floor debate on that bill, Transportation chairman Norman Mineta (D-CA) said, of the five-year term, “For too long the FAA has not had the experienced leadership it requires because its Administrators rarely stay more than 18 months. No sooner does an Administrator obtain the experience and knowledge necessary to effectively run the complex agency, when he would leave. I believe the term of office provision sends a strong signal that this is unacceptable.”

Mineta’s Senate counterpart, Wendell Ford (D-KY), said “the 5 year term will help the FAA with a continuity of leadership and stability.”

But it hasn’t really worked out that way. Only three Administrators since the term change became active have served the full term: Jane Garvey, Marion Blakey, and Michael Huerta (but you have to count the year-and-a-half that Huerta spent as Acting Administrator pre-confirmation to get him to 60 months nope, Michael Huerta emailed us to say that the departure date we had in an earlier version of the table was one year earlier than his actual departure date of 1/6/2018, so he served a full 60 months plus another 13 as Acting.):