Your Father's FAA

Here's Robert A. Sturgell, acting adminstrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, in the New York Times on the new air traffic control system the agency is installing:

"This is not your grandfather’s FAA.”

That suggests it just might be your father's FAA, which is not exactly encouraging, is it?

By the way, the Times story concludes that the root of the agency's current problems is that it's having trouble deciding whether it should be a tough regulator of the airlines or their partner. In that respect, the FAA can join a long list of agencies plagued by the difficulty of balancing those two roles.