We didn’t have one … we didn’t have two … we had three airlines that went out of business, one after another: Aloha on Monday, then ATA, and on Friday night, Skybus ceased operations.
That’s three airlines going under in one week.
And overseas, Alitalia is hanging in there precariously after the deal from Air France to buy them completely fell apart.
CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS, WHISTLEBLOWERS AND THE FAA
If you read the headlines, you’d think it was a really bad soap opera.
It was all about revenge and threats on the front page of the USA Today.
And you thought the Southwest story was going away? Uh uh, it is getting worse.
The whistleblowers testified before Senate and House committees (and I have to tell you, its not easy to listen to it) that there seems to be a pervasive pattern with the FAA being too cozy with the airlines it is supposed to regulate.
The FAA was given a mandate by Congress when it started the agency in 1935, which it can’t possibly perform because it is schizophrenic. It wants them to enforce and make airline policy and safety regulations — and at the same time promote the business of aviation. You cannot do both.
Every time the agency is confronted with a choice between economic impact and safety, guess where they go? Economic impact.
Now, guess what came out in the committee meeting in the hearings yesterday? That there is a policy in the FAA that actually allows airlines to avoid penalties by voluntarily disclosing their violations when they discover a problem. Hello? Gee, would I go to jail if I voluntarily disclosed to the bank that I was robbing them?
The real problem is how many inspectors do you have?
First of all, on every single level the FAA is understaffed—not enough air traffic controllers, not enough inspectors on every step of the way. For example, are the inspectors looking at the physical maintenance? Or are they just inspecting the paperwork that says the maintenance has been done? Anybody can check off a box. And that’s in this country.
What about the airlines like US Air and JetBlue that send their planes overseas for maintenance? Now trust me, I have no problem whatsoever with people who outsource maintenance, in fact, the work that is done in El Salvador for both US Air and JetBlue is excellent work, but that’s not the point. Who is physically inspecting the work?
If the answer is “we’re just inspecting the paperwork,” we got a problem.
I was in Chicago the other day and bumped into an FAA inspector while we were standing at the counter waiting for a plane that was late. I asked him who he was an inspector for.
And he said, “My assignment is to inspect all the planes flown by Mesa Airlines.” (Most people don’t realize it, but one of the airlines Mesa flies is an airline in Hawaii called Go! which many people feel is responsible for the demise of Aloha Airlines.)
I said to him, “Well, don’t you guys also inspect Go! in Hawaii?”
He said “Yeah.”
I said, “When was the last time you were in Hawaii?”
“Well, I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
You know, that doesn’t give me a comforting feeling.
The bottom line is you either inspect the maintenance or you ground the planes.
AIRWORTHINESS DIRECTIVES
There is a whole issue called “airworthiness directives.” As I explained last week, there are three different kinds of airworthiness directives that the FAA could issue:
- The weakest one is called a service bulletin which says when you bring the plane in for regular maintenance you might want to take a look at this, but there is no deadline, there is no sense of urgency.
- Then, there is something called a “modified airworthiness directive” which says, we’ve discovered a problem and, by the way, there is also a solution and we’ll give you three years to fix it. That one really makes me mad.
- And then the third one is the airworthiness directive that basically says you cannot fly this plane or this type of aircraft until it is fixed immediately with this problem. How often does the FAA issue that kind of airworthiness directive? Hardly ever!
So what happened when you saw American Airlines ground their fleet of MD-80s, when you saw Delta do the same thing, when you saw United Airlines ground their entire fleet of 777s this week. You know what that was?
In the wake of the disclosure of the cozy relationship between the FAA and Southwest airlines, all these three airlines said “We had all these airworthiness directives from the FAA that go back two or three years and we haven’t gotten around to it yet and the deadline is coming up in about five days. We better fix it or we’re going to get fined.”
First of all, why did it take them three years to do it?
And second of all, had the FAA thing had not surfaced with Southwest Airlines, would any of this other grounding happened?
So, the bottom line here is we’re just getting started. When you saw those FAA whistleblowers on the stand, in front of the committee and Congress, start to cry about how their jobs were threatened, how their families were threatened by their own supervisors because they wanted to do inspections on planes—what does that tell you about where the FAA interests lie?
I’m not shy about this. This is wrong, it has to stop.
And here is the most interesting thing: The airline industry will make the argument—and by the way, I can’t argue with this argument—that we’ve enjoyed the most incredibly phenomenal air safety record in almost seven years. We haven’t had a major jet fatality in this county since November 11, 2001 when we lost an American Airbus after takeoff from JFK.
Now, there may be 35,000 flights in the air today, tomorrow, the next day, yesterday and nothing happened. That is an amazing safety record. It is great, we should all applaud ourselves. Now, can we improve that safety record? No, you’re batting 1,000.
But how do you maintain it? You don’t maintain it when you have a culture of the FAA that allows people to slide, when you don’t have enough staff people to inspect the planes and when you’re dealing with an aging aircraft fleet, that requires—by definition—more and more maintenance.
When GM recalls a car, you bring it in. They don’t give you three years to bring it in. Why do they give the airlines three years to fix something? That is absolutely wrong.
30,000 MISSING BAGS - FIND NAOMI CAMPBELL’S!
When we talk about revenge and threats and everything else, it’s not just the FAA and Southwest airlines … it’s Naomi Campbell.
That’s right, the woman who needs anger management classes again did it again yesterday at Heathrow. She gets arrested why? Because they lost her bag.
Guess what? They lost 29,999 other bags. It’s out of control at Terminal 5.
You know how much I feel about Heathrow, you know how much I love it right? They keep on keeping on.
Thirty thousand bags and you know where they ended up? In Milan.
Read more from Peter’s Travel Detective Blog.
From Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio
Previous Coverage of FAA “Inspection-Gate”:
Travel Detective Blog: Airline Safety Starts With Maintenance
Southwest Suspended, FAA Employees Reassigned
FAA Groundings & Hawaiian Flights
Southwest Flew Unsafe Planes, FAA Under Fire
Peter,
Great article - and not surprising to me one bit when you look at how the FAA has ignored the safety of children on planes. (Lap Child Policy)
I do hope that this will result in some changes in the FAA - is that too optimistic? Until then, I will keep moving forward to educate parents to make their own informed decision about the safety of their children on planes.
As passengers we rely on the FAA to regulate airplane safety. I was able to deal with decreassed customer service when I viewed the airline as only a vehicle to get me from point A to point B without amenities. However, I never considered safety to be an amenity!
Thanks for your honesty and support on these issues!
Anya Clowers, RN
www.JetWithKids.com
It is an outrage (or an evil plan) that the FAA is insisting upon inspections NOW. They could, logically and in an orderly fashion, be coordinated to occur at NIGHT (10pm-5am) and be done on a scheduled basis, say, over the next 6 months.
Are the feds trying to sabotage:
the airlines
all businesses
us?
It is very frightening to see this unfold in front of our eyes…
Thank you for providing clarity, Peter, amid this latest aviation fiasco. Mainstream media “reporters” are accepting — and spoon feeding us — the spin that the American Airlines is addressing a serious threat to the safe operation of its planes caused by an obscure wiring problem. The real reason is so obvious I do not understand how anyone can overlook it. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was nailed by a whistleblower who revealed it had been letting certain “airworthiness directives” slide, specifically in the area of fuselage inspections by mechanics of Southwest Airlines.
The headlines were alarming and potentially damaging to the FAA. It fined Southwest more than $10 million to show it is still boss, but that was just the beginning.
Knowing it would wreak havoc on the business and leisure traveler — and not caring — the FAA obviously made it known to American that it was going to play hardball with regard to the airworthiness directive tied to MD80 wiring (which was first issued in 2006). It left American no choice but to ground its planes all at once.
This is a sly, some would say sinister, move by the FAA. It makes American look like the culprit. It makes American take all of the heat. It tells the public that the airlines do not care enough about safety, and certainly not as much as does the uncompromised FAA.
It takes the FAA off the hook. The federal government was roundly criticized for bailing out Bear Stearns in the financial sector, but that wasn’t about one investment bank. For better or worse, that was a proactive bail-out to protect the U.S. economy. Now we have a horrfying example of what can happen when big government does the opposite of protecting the nation’s interests, when it shamefully covers up its bureaucratic bungling and shuns accountability.
To make matters worse, the FAA screwed American Airlines at a time when the major airlines have never been more economically vulnerable.
What should have happened? Logically, the FAA should have taken its lumps after the dust settled in the Southwest matter. It fined SW more than $10 million, so it was certainly not handing out a wrist slap. Next, it needed to quietly circle its own wagons inside FAA HQ, reassess its inspection compliance procedures and face the fact that it dodged a bullet (no SW planes were compromised) and must become much more vigilant.
Then, the airlines needed to be advised, quietly and calmly, that they were all expected to pay closer attention to existing (and future) airworthiness directives, and that they were all receiving an extension in order to systematically inspect and address the types of maintenance issues (i.e., wiring of redundant hydraulic systems in MD80s) so as to avert industry chaos.
Instead, the FAA has gleefully diverted all of the anxiety, anger and blame pent up in business and leisure travelers to American (and to a lesser degree, Delta and United). They bet, correctly, that the public’s anger would be tempered by the fact that the cancellations were safety related, even though they are really related to sustaining the bureaucratic status quo.
I was an FAA Inspector and became a whistle blower the first time abiout 6 years ago. After that my office dumped work on me to the piont that I spent more than 150 days away from home. The grind finnaly came to a head after I recieved a dehabilitating injury. Rather than allowing me to heal the managers rode me hader, putting increadable stress on me to try and get me to quit. It got so bad that I could no longer work at the intencity they wanted.
i could not heal and had to apply to workers comp (OWCP). The managers lied to OWCP claiming that I was guitly of willfull misconduct. It took more than four months and letters to my Congresswoman and Senator to get the benifiets accepted. Nothing was done to the FAA managaers for making false reports.
During the time I was waitng for the agnecy to let me come back to work, I discoverd that the office had falsified most of my inspections using my name. Because of the liabilty for me I had again make a whistle blower report. The Agnecy denied stating that an TDY (temporay) Inspector came in and completed the work in one week. The agnacy what you to believe that one inspector, unfamilar with the state or the operators could do the work the assinged inspector takes 8 months to complete.
Nothing much came from it and I sent the report. to Congress. In December the FAA removed me from Federal Service. They stated that I was being removed for “non disiplinary” reasons.
OWCP then stated that since the FAA fired me and that we were only waiting for a job offer to return to the agency, I was told to find another job. When I did find a job OWCP complained and said It didn’t pay enough.
At my new job the FAA has visted the facilty not less that 5 times. I work at Comunity College, the repair station next door, that does outsource maintenace for air carriers, hasn’t been visited that many times.
it wasn’t enough for the FAA that I lost my job, they have to make sure I can’t get any money. the lastest is that my former manager at the FAA had made contact with OWCP and made false accusations that got my OWCP benifiets terminated.
Now here I am trying to figure out what to do next. I have a wife and two small children that didn’t deserve this. I should have stayed at my last job but I felt I could be a good public servant promoting a subject I fell strongly about….Safety.