The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a rule that would, if finalized, override a line of California court decisions requiring airlines to give California-based flight attendants the same duty-free meal and rest breaks California law guarantees other workers. The proposed rule, published in the Federal Register as Docket FAA-2026-6739, would declare that FAA’s own duty-and-rest regulations for flight crews preempt state and local meal-and-rest-break laws outright — effectively legislating around the litigation losses the agency and the airline industry have suffered in California courts over the past several years.

The FAA’s own rulemaking document identifies exactly which litigation prompted it: “recent litigation – most notably Bernstein v. Virgin America, Inc. 3 F. 4th 1127 and Wilson v. SkyWest Airlines, Inc.(Case No. 3:19-cv-01491)  U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California – over the applicability of State meal and rest break laws to flight attendants has underscored the need” for the rule. Both cases decided California controversies, not a generalized industry complaint.

In Bernstein, a certified class of California-based Virgin America flight attendants sued the airline for failing to provide meal breaks, rest breaks, overtime pay, and compliant wage statements as required under the California Labor Code. Virgin America argued the Federal Aviation Act and the Airline Deregulation Act preempted California’s break requirements as applied to an airline’s flight crews, since a flight attendant must remain available throughout a flight to handle safety duties. The Ninth Circuit rejected that argument on every theory the airline raised — field preemption, conflict preemption, and Airline Deregulation Act preemption — and affirmed summary judgment for the flight attendants on their rest and meal break claims, reasoning that airlines could comply with both federal safety rules and California’s break requirements simply by staffing longer flights with an additional flight attendant. Alaska Airlines, which had acquired Virgin America, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review; the Court denied certiorari on June 30, 2022, leaving the Ninth Circuit’s ruling as binding law within the circuit, over the objection of an amicus brief from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several states warning it would create a costly, unworkable patchwork of state rules for a national industry.

Wilson v. SkyWest Airlines followed the same pattern on nearly identical facts. Two California-based SkyWest flight attendants sued over the airline’s alleged failure to provide meal breaks, rest breaks, and proper wage statements. In a 2021 summary judgment order, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria held the claims were not preempted, expressly relying on Bernstein as controlling precedent, and rejected SkyWest’s argument that its own on-duty-meal-period side agreements with employees adequately substituted for California’s statutory requirements, granting the flight attendants partial summary judgment on SkyWest’s liability for the break violations. Together, Bernstein and Wilson left airlines operating in California, or employing California-based crews, exposed to Labor Code liability for break violations that federal aviation law did not previously reach.

The FAA’s proposed rule is designed to close that exposure prospectively through regulation rather than further litigation. It would add two new provisions to Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations — §§ 117.31(a) and 121.468(a) — stating that FAA’s existing flightcrew and flight attendant duty-and-rest regulations preempt state and local laws covering the same subject matter. Rather than writing new substantive break rules, the FAA is asserting that its existing regulatory scheme already occupies the field. The agency grounds that position in two separate theories: first, that state laws requiring crew to be fully relieved of duty during a break directly conflict with the federal safety expectation that crew remain available throughout a flight to respond to fires, medical emergencies, unruly passengers, or evacuations, an argument the FAA bolsters with data showing lithium-battery-related onboard incidents rose from 39 in 2020 to 93 in 2025; and second, that state meal-and-rest-break laws are independently preempted under the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 because they have a “significant impact” on airline prices, routes, and services, a standard the statute’s express preemption clause (49 U.S.C. § 41713(b)(1)) sets for state regulation of air carriers.

The proposal frames the inconsistency among state break laws as a matter of “national significance” under Executive Order 13132’s federalism framework, and the agency says it has limited the scope of preemption to the “minimum level necessary” to achieve its safety and economic objectives. Notably, the FAA is not proposing to wipe out existing accommodations built through collective bargaining: the rule acknowledges that some flight attendants already receive negotiated break protections through Railway Labor Act collective bargaining agreements or individual airline policies — the same mechanism California itself recognized in 2023 when it enacted Labor Code amendments (SB 41) exempting flight attendants from the state’s standard break requirements where a qualifying collective bargaining agreement addresses breaks. The FAA is inviting comment on whether a final rule should codify elements of those existing CBA-based approaches, rather than leave crews without CBA coverage, or without such agreements addressing breaks, entirely without a break protection floor.

The rule has drawn immediate attention from aviation labor unions and California officials likely to oppose it during the comment period, given that it would functionally reverse two hard-won court victories through executive rulemaking rather than new legislation. Airlines and industry groups, including some that filed amicus support for Virgin America and SkyWest during the underlying litigation, are expected to support the rule as restoring the uniform national standard they argued for unsuccessfully in court. Comments on the proposal are due September 4, 2026, after which the FAA will need to respond to the comment record before any final rule could take effect — a process that itself is likely to draw legal challenges regardless of the outcome, given the significant stakes for both flight crew working conditions and airline operating costs nationwide.