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When Chris Rocheleau departed the downtown Washington, D.C. offices of the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) and reported for duty at the Federal Aviation Administration building on Independence Avenue, he never could have predicted that just a week into his tenure as deputy administrator the worst U.S. air safety disaster in 16 years would happen a couple of miles down the road — and that he would be at the center, managing it all.
“I’m not gonna lie, it was very difficult,” Rocheleau told The Air Current in an exclusive interview, explaining that the urgency of assembling the immediate response coupled with a transportation secretary who was on his first day in the role made the situation particularly challenging. Rocheleau spent 20 collective years at the agency prior to a three-year stint as chief operating officer at NBAA. He returned to help the FAA capitalize on what he described as an opportunity to reform the agency, not as its public-facing chief, but as a “force inside,” in the deputy role.
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“I thought if I got back in and started driving from the deputy’s chair, so the COO chair of the agency, I could actually help get some of this stuff get through,” he said, specifically calling out the still-pending Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) rulemaking for drone operators, among other delayed initiatives at the agency that he wants to see completed.
While the issues of drones, airspace modernization, ramped-up air traffic control hiring, knocking down internal bureaucracy and many others have already come up under Rocheleau’s tenure, he has also been thrown into a crisis, alongside transportation secretary Sean Duffy, after several tragic aviation accidents in close succession. While his ascent was widely-expected prior to the air disasters, Rocheleau was officially appointed to the acting administrator role by Trump less than 24 hours after the worst of these, when a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Eagle CRJ700 collided in midair near Washington’s Reagan National Airport (DCA) on Jan. 29.
That pulled the nation’s aviation agency back into the public eye, and put Rocheleau downstream from policy decisions, comments and new postures from his boss, Duffy, and his boss’s boss, President Donald Trump.
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