Attention All Passengers (22 page)

Since poring over FAA records can be a dead end, a few years back I turned to NASA, which maintains a valuable resource called the Aviation Safety Reporting System. ASRS generates feedback from industry professionals and publishes their warnings about specific problem areas. NASA redacts the names of individuals, since it wants critical and even life-threatening information to be shared freely. ASRS is a necessary and vital communication channel, though I don't believe airline names should be omitted.

If a posting to ASRS is serious enough, NASA will issue an Alert Bulletin, and that's what it did in 2005 with a “critical” problem on an unnamed domestic airline, affecting dozens of its aircraft. The bulletin read: “Technicians reported finding broken, loose, and missing wheel tie bolts on wheels built up by a contract-maintenance facility.” A contract-maintenance facility, eh? Hmmm. Although the airline's name wasn't provided, the types of affected aircraft were, so I cross-referenced the airplane models with the fleets operated by every U.S. carrier—and all evidence pointed to Northwest. I contacted Northwest and inquired of a public relations rep if the wheel tie bolt problem had been addressed. Then I waited. He soon got back and assured me the problem had been fixed, thereby confirming the identity of the airline NASA had refused to disclose.

Why was this critical and potentially life-threatening problem brought to light through a voluntary reporting system operated by NASA and not through the FAA, the agency in charge of overseeing Northwest's maintenance? Why were no fines levied? And in an age of supposed government transparency, why wasn't the FAA publicly reporting on such a critical safety issue? In fact, if the problem was so widespread and so threatening to passenger safety, why wasn't the fleet grounded until all wheel tie bolts were repaired?

Like all airlines, Northwest knew that farming out maintenance and aircraft handling to lowballing contractors was risky. I obtained a copy of an internal Northwest email from a senior executive dated April 2006, warning airport managers that outsourced employees could create safety concerns: “We are certain of at least one thing: changes and inexperienced employees running equipment. . . . This is one of those failures we can actually prepare for.” There you have it. A senior airline exec acknowledging that outsourcing leads to “failure.”

Although the lessons of ValuJet and Air Midwest were lost on the airlines, the lessons of the Northwest strike have been taken to heart.

Back in the U.S.A.

If there is
any
reason to believe major carriers might once again service their fleets on U.S. soil, ironically enough it might derive from United, a company in the forefront of shipping jobs overseas. In 2009 the Teamsters approached United chairman Glenn Tilton and asked to bid on some outsourced jobs and to perform the work at that underutilized maintenance base in San Francisco. A small step, yes, but a tentative and still shaky alliance is being forged. David Bourne says, “Now we're insourcing and bringing work back in [to the United States]. We know we have to be competitive.” Does it inspire a little optimism? “Absolutely! But you can't get it done overnight.”

After so much investigating of maintenance outsourcing, I decided it was time to examine the lone exception. I planned a two-day visit to the American Airlines Maintenance and Engineering Base in Tulsa, the largest private employer in Oklahoma. I wanted to meet what I desperately hoped was not an endangered species: U.S. airline mechanics.

As the last bastion, American actually faces two herculean tasks: the first is continuing to service its own planes at a competitive cost disadvantage, and the second is attracting new business through insourcing.

I arrived at “the largest commercial aircraft maintenance facility in the world” as a joint guest of both American and the Transport Workers Union, and spent time with both management and labor. I walked several miles to tour the 330-acre plant, which employs 6,700 workers and was established in 1946 when the airline bought a B-24 complex at a postwar surplus price. Over the years Tulsa has expanded to accommodate jets, wide-bodies, and the aforementioned “Growth Plan” in the 1980s.

Simply put, it was an impressive tour. The facility is a small village and even includes manufacturing and machine shops (“every bushing from scratch”), costly investments smaller airlines could never make. But another costly investment is the workforce, which is highly trained and overwhelmingly licensed by the FAA. “There is a less expensive way to go,” says Bill Collins, vice president of base maintenance for American. “We pay a bit of a premium to have all our mechanics certified.”

Yet last year the FAA proposed a $24.2 million civil penalty against American for failing to inspect wire bundles in the wheel wells of MD-80 aircraft, the highest fine ever proposed in FAA history. This from the same FAA that levied
no
maintenance fines against Northwest when nearly its entire workforce walked off the job. How could this be?

There's a sticky question hanging, one that's been whispered within the industry for years now, and I finally asked it in Tulsa: Is American being unfairly targeted by the FAA because unlike all its domestic competitors, it operates right under the proverbial noses of federal inspectors? After all, the FAA has an office right outside the gates on North Memorial Drive and averages two visits per week, and sometimes as many as six inspectors are on the premises at once. So is American an all-too-easy target in Tulsa, unlike those in China or El Salvador? Brad Mueller of the TWU provided an intriguing response by suggesting that FAA inspectors overseeing work in Asia or Latin America be asked: “Do they have dedicated parking spots out front there like they do with us?” The answer is obvious.

American's relations with the FAA are “cordial,” according to Collins, but he diplomatically added, “It's not something that gets talked about with senior management.” However, he did suggest he has it easier than his counterparts at other carriers: “I can sleep at night because everything has been thoroughly vetted.”

Collins said, “We believe it's a competitive advantage. The risk mitigation factor is considerable. . . . It's about having an accident or not having an accident. By orders of magnitude, the premium is justified in that way.”

That seems like inarguable logic. Yet many other airline executives, board members, analysts, and investors clearly don't justify such a premium. Now all eyes are on American's bankruptcy proceedings.

Reagan Revolution Home to Roost

The airline industry has woven the defense of outsourcing into a defense of capitalism itself. Airline execs continually resurrect the dour Calvin Coolidge to intone, “The chief business of the American people is business.” As for the wisdom of employing unsupervised minimum-wage workers to maintain wide-body commercial jets when they can't read the repair manuals, free-market advocates characterize those who beg to differ as being just to the left of Fidel Castro.

Someone with the battle scars to prove it is former DOT inspector general Mary Schiavo; a few years ago she told me, “Back in the 1990s I was saying we need to reregulate certain aspects of aviation—if you said that, it was like you were the devil yourself. Government needs to do for the citizens the things they can't do for themselves. Some said airlines will regulate themselves—it was a great myth. The airlines do not and cannot do it.”

Instead, we have an FAA that has called airlines its “customers,” a phenomenon that's occurred elsewhere, such as with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Toyota. It all comes back to cost. Consider this chilling statement from NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman: “You can't get through a cost-benefit analysis without the numbers. You have to wait for people to be killed.”

I asked Secretary LaHood, at what point does maintenance outsourcing become a government issue? He responded, “Oh, I think it becomes a government issue when the FAA bill gets considered and foreign repair stations are included and that's when we begin to weigh in and see how that plays out.”

Unfortunately, Congress won't step in soon. As recently as March 2010, Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, was pushing for an amendment that would prohibit work at noncertificated repair stations and increase FAA inspections and drug and alcohol testing. But a source on Capitol Hill told me the amendment was dead, primarily because Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia would actively oppose the amendment over concerns it “would violate the safety treaty language the FAA signed with foreign nations.” For the record, ARSA reports that repair stations in West Virginia employ 1,448 workers, with a total economic impact on the state of $157.1 million. (Neither McCaskill nor Rockefeller responded to repeated requests for interviews.)

The policies that now threaten our nation's aviation safety record can be traced to 1981, when President Ronald Reagan came into office warning “government is not the solution to our problem; government
is
the problem.” But today the real and present danger threatening airline safety is weak enforcement, thanks to nearly three decades of the Reagan “smaller government” mantra. Reagan's infamous quip that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I'm from the government and I'm here to help” should be considered in the context of an FAA that treats airlines—not the flying public—as its customers.

Has the federal government implemented nonsensical regulations? No question. Has it wasted tax dollars? Absolutely. Would bureaucracy impede many of the industry's brightest innovators if the government completely ran the airlines? Certainly.

But demonizing regulators and placing all trust in the free market is a dangerous proposition as well. When tragedy strikes the airline industry, apologists claim that executives don't want such accidents to occur. Of course, one would hope as much. But airline executives also should not be the last line of defense in
preventing
such accidents. Based on my experiences working in and investigating the airline industry, I can personally testify that there truly are airline executives who cut corners on safety. That's irrefutable fact.

8

Unsafe at Any Altitude?

Facing Unprecedented Dangers

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

—Amelia Earhart, pilot

L
et's be very clear: Commercial aviation is the safest form of transportation available. What's more, it is particularly safe in the United States—though the statistics are quite different when regional carriers are broken out separately. But this is an industry that suffered no domestic fatalities in 2011.

The most dangerous year for airlines was 1929—fifty-one fatal crashes—but the record has steadily improved for more than eighty years. According to Boeing, fatal accidents occurred about once every 200,000 flights in the 1950s and 1960s; worldwide, the record is more than ten times better today, with fatal accidents occurring less than once every 2 million flights. The Insurance Institute of America states the lifetime odds of dying in a car accident are 303 to 1 now, while dying in an air or space accident are 7,032 to 1.

“Aviation is in a league of its own when it comes to safety,” says Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. She notes: “More than one out of five trucks are unsafe when you drive alongside them to visit grandma. If we had that kind of maintenance issue with airplanes, no one would fly. We tolerate deficiencies in other modes of transportation regularly. The bar is set differently with aviation.”

The true experts on aviation safety speak in their own language. “Safety is sort of like beauty,” explains Todd Curtis, founder of AirSafe.com; “it's in the eye of the beholder.” His résumé is impeccable—Princeton, MIT, the Air Force, Boeing—and his site is a trove of airline safety statistics, diced and sliced by time lines, airlines, aircraft. But every mathematical equation and nugget of information comes with a caveat, because wading into safety is all about lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Airline safety often comes down to body counts. As Curtis says, “When it comes to the amount of ink spilled, what really drives the issue is if passengers are killed.” Just as homicides are not all treated equally by police, aviation accidents are not treated equally by regulators, legislators, and journalists. High-profile accidents often generate more resources for investigations and remedies.

Identifying the most important risks isn't easy. The list includes everything from bird strikes to volcanic ash to laptop batteries stored in overhead bins. New threats arise continually—airlines are removing life rafts from aircraft and oxygen masks from onboard lavatories (or is that a good thing, since it reduces the terrorist threat?).

A Risky Business

The airline gods were busy on April Fool's Day 2011. I was in snowy Boston, meeting with two well-known airline safety experts, MIT professor Arnold Barnett and former NTSB member John Goglia. Meanwhile, on the floor of Congress, Republican lawmakers were pushing through an FAA reauthorization bill that called for slashing $4 billion from the agency's budget—cuts that experts said would most certainly lead to inspector layoffs. On the same day, Peggy Gilligan, the FAA's associate administrator for aviation safety, was speaking at the Aeronautical Repair Station Association's Annual Repair Symposium. Simultaneously, a five-foot hole was suddenly opening in the roof of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 en route from Phoenix to Sacramento. Clearly the theme of the day was risk.

In the end, safety is all about risk and reward. And the FAA—like all government agencies—must conduct analyses of rules and directives based on lives saved and lives lost. It's messy and controversial work. Little wonder the mayhem depicted in the novel
Fight Club
is told by our unnamed protagonist, a Product Recall Specialist analyzing defective automobiles on a cost-benefit basis in the wake of fatal car accidents.

“Change is risk,” says Tom Brantley, president of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a union representing FAA employees. He notes that the FAA has changed how it measures accidents, by creating separate silos for large and small airlines, and therefore “it's not apples to apples.” He also cites a combination of troubling factors, including an aging fleet of commercial planes in the United States, less experienced cockpit crews, and a loss of “tribal knowledge” passed on through generations of mechanics.

At MIT, Barnett says, “A lot of supposed risks turn out to be statistical mirages.” He adds that new technological data mining techniques have gotten so sophisticated they can ask logical questions about risks. “So there is reason to be hopeful,” he says. “You can see anomalies that did not result in accidents. So you can anticipate problems.”

But in an era of fewer accidents, measuring risk has become harder. This is particularly true because old gremlins—such as wind shear, lightning strikes, and some types of pilot error—have been largely addressed, so that today causes can be more complex.
1
Curtis asserts that had the TWA Flight 800 explosion off the coast of Long Island in 1996 occurred on another Boeing 747—say a cargo model in a rural area—the NTSB would never have spent four years on the investigation.

Dangerous Ground: Runway Incursions/Excursions

The FAA defines a runway incursion as “any occurrence at an airport involving an aircraft, vehicle, person, or object on the ground that creates a collision hazard or results in a loss of separation with an aircraft taking off, attempting to take off, landing, or attempting to land.” Such events are further classified by a severity index, with the most dangerous occurrences labeled Category A, those in which “extreme action [is taken] to narrowly avoid a collision, or in which a collision occurs.”

The NTSB has been vocal about this for years. Among the “Most Wanted” actions it is seeking from the FAA are the following: flight crews should be given immediate warnings of probable collisions; each runway crossing requires specific air traffic control clearance; airlines should install cockpit moving map displays or an automatic system to alert pilots when the wrong taxiway or runway is broached; and a “landing distance assessment” should be devised for every landing.

The NTSB's Jeff Marcus explains that the FAA collects a lot of statistics on near-misses, and there are differing severities that greatly affect the significance of these findings; the worst are incidents that fall into the A to D categories, in which aircraft are just a few feet apart. He contends that the real issue is not the total number of events, but how these events relate to traffic statistics. Overall, he contends that the FAA has made “real progress” in addressing these threats.

In its Annual Runway Safety Report for 2010, the FAA stated there were 951 runway incursions in 2009, down from 1,009 in 2008; furthermore, there were 12 “serious” incursions in 2009, down from 25 the year before. The report concluded: “When serious runway incursions drop by 50 percent over the previous year, you know you're doing something right.”

But the news is not all bright. Whistle-blower Richard Wyeroski's career at the FAA entered a downward spiral after he began investigating not one but two dangerous Category A incursions that occurred within the same week at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip. Apparently the real problem was that both events involved major airlines: first Delta, then Southwest.

On March 4, 2000, a Delta jet was cleared for takeoff on Runway 24, even though a Cessna 172 had just landed and was still taxiing on 24; Wyeroski estimates the Boeing 737 cleared the roof of the Cessna by less than fifty feet. He recalls that the pilots in the Cessna were so traumatized they couldn't exit the airplane on their own. That same week the MacArthur tower also cleared a Southwest 737 for takeoff, right in front of a small aircraft that had been cleared to land on the same runway (luckily the pilot of the smaller plane took evasive action and aborted the landing).

Wyeroski maintains that reporting these two events caused his dismissal. After being fired by the FAA, he later filed a statement with the Disclosure Unit of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in which he claimed he had been told by an FAA supervisor that Wyeroski's boss was “really pissed” over his reporting of the incursions.

A Fatigued Industry

The NTSB's original “Most Wanted” list included improvements in combating human fatigue, but since then, not much has changed. Indeed, the NTSB's latest “Most Wanted” list still includes Human Fatigue in the Aviation Industry. Specifically, the NTSB suggests setting working-hour limits for flight crews, aviation mechanics, and air traffic controllers based on fatigue research, circadian rhythms, and sleep and rest requirements. It also recommends developing guidance for operators to establish fatigue management systems, including a methodology that will continually assess the effectiveness of these systems.

According to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, “over 14 accidents resulting in 263 fatalities had fatigue as a causal or contributing factor” since 1993. Then in the spring of 2011, the issue became front-page news after a controller fell asleep at Washington National Airport; in the weeks that followed, similar incidents occurred throughout the country—Lubbock, Reno, Seattle.

Congress immediately spoke out, and in a Senate hearing Senator Jay Rockefeller stated: “We shouldn't tarnish the whole profession based on the poor judgment of a few. . . . We can't allow recent questions about the safety of the FAA to permeate air travel.” Brantley says the sleeping controllers were “embarrassing” for the FAA. After all, the agency is responsible for ensuring safety in American aviation, yet air traffic controllers are FAA employees.

I spoke to then administrator Babbitt about this and even admitted to my own snoozing back at Pan Am Shuttle. Here's what he had to say: “We're rewriting the rule for pilots and we're taking a similar approach. We pay people to come to work rested and ready.” But he also encourages aviation professionals to speak up about this topic: “In this day and age we encourage people to self-report. Tell us . . . don't sit there and be lost in space.”

As with many issues related to airlines, there is a communications disconnect. When news reports of sleeping controllers first broke, angry politicians and pundits demanded explanations. Meanwhile, industry professionals shrugged—who didn't know about napping on the job? FAA whistle-blower Ed Jeszka provides perspective: “Do you know how long that has been going on? Ask pilots who fly night flights. Very often they are handed off [from one air traffic control facility to another] and no one responds on the radio.”

In fact, the dirty little secret of aviation—and perhaps many other critical 24/7 professions—is that napping at work has always existed. It certainly did in Operations Control when I was at the Pan Am Shuttle. A pilot confirms it was standard procedure for cockpit crews on red-eye flights.

This is in no way to excuse what can be dangerous behavior. Experts point out there obviously are two huge caveats here: (1) critical personnel still must be available to respond immediately; and (2) when two or more are on duty, they need to take shifts, just as the military rotates guard duty in hostile environments. But now aviation professionals are attempting to better understand circadian rhythms and find solutions.

Marcus says the NTSB “butted heads for a long time” with the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association over controller fatigue—and this was before a spate of “sleeping controller” stories dominated headlines. However, he is optimistic new FAA staffing will address this problem.

Foreign Carriers: Who's in Charge?

In the 1990s many aviation professionals began asking who oversees foreign airlines operating in and out of U.S. airspace. The answer, of course, was and is the FAA, but the issue garnered more attention after the crash of Avianca Flight 52 one foggy night in 1990, when a Boeing 707 simply ran out of fuel and fell from the sky over Cove Neck, New York, fifteen miles short of John F. Kennedy International Airport. As a licensed dispatcher, I was particularly intrigued by the NTSB's summation: “Contributing to the accident was the flight crew's failure to use an airline operational control dispatch system to assist them during the international flight into a high-density airport in poor weather.” Aviation professionals were stunned that seventy-three people were killed because a passenger airline did not have a dispatcher on duty (a requirement for U.S. carriers since 1938), and its Spanish-speaking crew members were unable to convey to controllers the seriousness of their fuel depletion, requesting a “priority” rather than an “emergency” landing.

Back in 1994 I wrote a lengthy article for
Air Transport World
titled “Two Sets of Rules,” which detailed how foreign airlines adhere not to Part 121 of the Federal Aviation Regulations but to a much more lenient interpretation, Part 129. I also reported that the FAA maintained a “blacklist” of countries banned from allowing their aircraft to operate here, but the list was not made public. Anthony Broderick, then the FAA's associate administrator for regulation and certification, stated: “If we release all of our documents to the public, that's not appropriate. And it can have a chilling effect on our relationship with that other government.”

Thankfully, there is more transparency today. Under the International Aviation Safety Assessments program, the FAA states it has established two ratings for countries at the time of assessment: Category 1, the nation complies with International Civil Aviation Organization standards, or Category 2, it does not. (ICAO, which is chartered by the United Nations, establishes worldwide safety standards for airlines but has no enforcement authority.) The 2011 list consists of 103 countries assessed, of which 22 do not meet ICAO benchmarks; this list overwhelmingly consists of developing nations in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, though it does include Indonesia, Israel, and the Philippines. In the case of Israel, for example, the FAA cited “areas of concern” with the country's civil aviation authority following an assessment in 2008, but it hasn't prevented Israeli aircraft from operating here under “heightened surveillance”; however, the FAA says “Israeli air carriers will not be allowed to establish new service to the United States” until the Category 1 rating is regained.