Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) is demanding answers from the Federal Aviation Administration on what guidance it has given to U.S. airlines amid their ongoing refusal to fly to Israel. 

Molinaro, a member of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, wrote to FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker on Friday asking if the agency had in any way instructed or encouraged U.S. airlines to suspend flights to the Jewish state, either temporarily or indefinitely. 

The letter, obtained exclusively by Jewish Insider, asks for the FAA to provide its official and unofficial communications with the airlines and the International Civil Aviation Organization “in the past two months.” It also asks how the agency works “to ensure that political matters do not influence the decision-making process of the FAA.”

“I have hundreds of constituents who had booked flights to Tel Aviv that are now canceled by the air carriers, with no timeline for resuming. As you can imagine, this is incredibly frustrating to Americans who expect the airline industry to work in a predictable and fair manner. Especially since non-U.S. airlines are continuing to fly into Israel without issue,” Molinaro wrote, adding that “Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel is considered one of the safest airports in the world.”

“The FAA sends urgent warnings and notices through the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system and restrictions through Special Federal Aviation Regulations (SFAR). The last time the FAA issued a warning about Israeli airspace was in October 2023, when Hamas launched the deadly and horrific attack on Israel,” he added. “There has been no NOTAM warning or SFAR related to flights into Israel since then. Despite this, U.S. based airlines have suspended all flights from the United States into Israel. This creates several questions as I try to understand why these flights are indefinitely suspended.”

The memo was sent two days after Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) sent a letter to the CEOs of American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines urging them to reconsider their prolonged flight suspensions “in order to prevent the appearance and the substance of discrimination against the Jewish State.” 

That letter came just over a week after American Airlines announced that it would extend its suspension of flights to Israel through April 2025, prompting concern from Torres that such decisions were being made without FAA guidance that such flights are unsafe.

News of American Airlines’ suspension until 2025 followed Delta’s recent announcement that it will not fly to Israel until Sept. 30 of this year, months after revealing since-scuttled plans to resume flights from New York’s JFK Airport to Tel Aviv in June. With United Airlines having suspended flights to Israel indefinitely after briefly resuming limited service in March, American fliers have been left with El Al as their only option to travel directly from the U.S. to the Jewish state.

U.S. airlines further suspended flights after Iran launched an attack on Israel in April, firing hundreds of missiles that were almost entirely intercepted by Israeli and regional air defense systems. More recently, Iran has been threatening retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader, in Tehran since the strike that killed him last month. 

“The suspension has been so prolonged and so pervasive that El Al, an Israeli airline, has become the sole carrier offering direct flights from America to Israel. The lack of competition has made air travel to Israel less available and less affordable, putting customers at the mercy of a de facto monopoly that can easily gouge prices with impunity,” Torres wrote to American Airlines CEO Robert Isom, Delta CEO Ed Bastian and United CEO Scott Kirby. 

Delta Airlines issued a travel advisory late last month that read, “Delta is continuously monitoring the evolving security environment and assessing our operations based on security guidance and intelligence reports.”

Lufthansa, which had shut down operations briefly but has resumed service on and off, announced on Sunday that it would resume flights to Tel Aviv starting Thursday, Sept. 5.

Torres, who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, pointed to the FAA’s controversial 36-hour ban on flights in 2014 from U.S. carriers to Ben Gurion Airport during Israel’s war against Hamas that summer, noting that the agency had not issued a similar order at any point since Oct. 7, 2023. Instead, Torres accused the airlines of “arbitrarily and unilaterally” imposing “its own ban on travel to Israel, independently of an order from the FAA.”

“Airlines should be prohibited from effectively boycotting or otherwise discriminating against the world’s only Jewish State. It is one thing to temporarily suspend air travel to Israel on security grounds as defined by the FAA. But to unilaterally suspend air travel indefinitely until mid-2025, as American Airlines has done, has the practical effect of a boycott,” he wrote. “Given the arbitrary length of the suspension, one could be forgiven for thinking that the BDS movement had taken over the American aviation industry without anyone noticing, much less crying foul.”

“By what logic and in what universe is it safe for El Al to travel to Israel but too dangerous for American Airlines, Delta, and United to do so? It is worth noting that UAE airlines like Etihad, FlyDubai, and Wizz Air Abu Dhabi continue to fly to Israel without incident,” Torres said.