A federal advisory committee will spend two days this month telling the Transportation Department how to protect air travelers.
Don’t hold your breath. It has four members, one of whom represents consumers, and it hasn’t met in more than three years. According to the government’s own notice, it won’t vote on a single recommendation when it meets on September 22.
Congress created the Aviation Consumer Protection Advisory Committee in 2012 to give passengers a voice inside the agency that regulates airlines. What’s left is a two-day webinar about paperwork.
What does the committee plan to do?
Only three items are on the agenda. They’re all disclosure documents Congress already ordered in the 2024 FAA reauthorization law: the one-page passenger rights summary airlines must post, the online dashboards for delays, family seating and seat size, and the know-your-rights posters airports must display.
That’s it. And the notice says the meeting is only for “topic presentations.” Deliberation on recommendations comes later, on a date nobody has set.
Compare that with Jan. 12, 2023, the last time the committee met. There were six substantive items in one day, with the words “deliberation and recommendation” next to every one: baggage fees, change fees, family seating fees, refunds.
Is anyone representing you?
Who’s representing passengers? Not Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers, who holds the state and local seat. Not Mark VanLoh of the Jacksonville Aviation Authority, who has the airport seat. And certainly not Doug Lavin of the airline trade group IATA.
Consumers get one seat. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy gave it to Jennifer Rykaczewski of the Affordable Skies Foundation, which launched in December 2024. She spent five years in the airline industry and started the group after Allegiant Airlines CEO Maury Gallagher encouraged her to. The Digital Democracy Project describes the coalition as primarily funded by member organizations within the aviation and travel industry.
Cheaper airfare is a worthwhile cause, but it isn’t the same as enforcing the protections passengers are already supposed to have.
What happened while the committee was dark
Between January 2023 and this month, the Transportation Department dismantled much of what it had built for passengers. The committee charged with evaluating those programs never met.
- DOT withdrew the rulemaking in late 2025 that would have made airlines cover cash, rebooking, meals and hotels for delays they caused.
- A few months later, the department stopped enforcing refund rights when an airline renumbers a flight, and in July it extended that pause to July 2027.
- Early this year, the DOT’s consumer protection office announced enforcement would focus on compliance “rather than finding and penalizing entities for violations.” An airline that reports its own violation can avoid a penalty.
- A month later, based on a technicality, a federal appeals court threw out the 2024 rule requiring airlines to show bag and change fees alongside the fare. Rather than fix it, DOT restored the 2011 standard in July. Search a fare today, and the bag fee needn’t appear.
- Last month, for the second time, the department delayed the wheelchair rule to April 30, 2027. It makes damaging or delaying a wheelchair an automatic violation of the Air Carrier Access Act.
- On Sept. 4, DOT closed its review of airline privacy practices and found no violations, nine days after Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Shontel Brown asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the department’s “systemic abdication of its consumer privacy enforcement mandates.”
That’s six developments in 14 months. Not one appears on the September agenda.
Why it’s a rubber stamp
DOT picks all four members. Its own consumer protection office supplies the committee’s federal officer and writes the agenda. The committee has no staff and no budget, and nothing in the law requires the secretary to answer a recommendation, let alone follow one. Of its 46 lifetime recommendations, 30% were fully implemented and 22% partly. Nearly half went to the shredder.
So what should be on the agenda?
The statute lets the committee recommend “any additional consumer protection that may be needed.” Here are three places where it could start:
Fee transparency. The court struck down the rule on procedure, not the merits, and DOT can write it again. The committee’s own 2013 report recommended full fee disclosure across every sales channel. More than a decade later, the department threw it into reverse.
Compensation. With that rule making withdrawn, the U.S. has no delay compensation standard. The European Union, Canada, Brazil and India all do. A passenger flying Madrid to Frankfurt has more rights than one flying Chicago to Newark.
Fares set by algorithm. Airlines are testing pricing built on data about individual travelers. The FTC is taking comments through September 25, but only DOT regulates airfare, and nobody has asked it whether a price built from your personal data is deceptive.
One thing the committee could do
The one-page summary is a statement about what rights you have. Its silence implies there’s nothing more to say. But there is. The committee could recommend the summary disclose that federal law requires no compensation for a delay, no meal and no hotel room, then point you to the DOT complaint form. If you have no rights, let’s be transparent about it.
You can say something, too. Written comments go to docket DOT-OST-2018-0190 at regulations.gov any time. For three minutes on the record during the meeting, email ACPAC@dot.gov by Sept. 21.
Nobody at that table has to listen to what you have to say. But if you plan to fly anywhere in 2027, maybe they should.
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