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FAA Chief Apologizes for Gaps in Surveillance

Air Safety Week, April 21, 2008

FAA Acting Administrator Robert Sturgell used a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation hearing to apologize for oversight gaps that resulted in groundings at Southwest Airlines and American Airlines.

Last month, Southwest Airlines (SWA) filed a report under the Voluntary Disclosure Reporting Program (VDRP) notifying FAA of its noncompliance with a structural Airworthiness Directive (AD).

The FAA's subsequent investigation revealed that between March 15, 2007, and March 23, 2007, Southwest operated the 46 affected aircraft on 1,451 additional revenue flights when it knew that it had not conducted the repetitive inspection required by the AD - making the planes not airworthy.

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"These violations were deliberate and led to the initiation of enforcement action against Southwest Airlines resulting in a civil penalty of $10.2 million announced on March 6, 2008," said Sturgell.

"The on site principal maintenance inspector for Southwest Airlines, an FAA employee, was aware at the time that Southwest was not in compliance with the AD. He had a clear responsibility to act and fell short of that responsibility. He has been reassigned to a different position pending further investigation and personnel action. Additional personnel actions are also in progress," he added.

Since then, the FAA has held a series of meeting "to emphasize the importance of open and timely communications about all safety issues. We are undertaking a five-point plan to refine our programs and ensure more accountability in our processes.

"As part of the plan, we will be implementing a Safety Issues Reporting System (SIRS) to ensure awareness of reports at high levels of management in both FAA and the airlines, and clarifying and upgrading our AD processes.

"Furthermore, we have initiated a review of AD compliance, with initial results demonstrating 99 percent compliance. We expect to complete this in- depth review in June.

"While our safety record indicates this is not a systemic problem, we are always open to working with industry and Congress to make our safe system even safer," Sturgell testified.

But Calvin Scovel, inspector general at the Department of Transportation, said reform of how the FAA conducts its oversight of air carriers are urgently needed.

"Several high-profile events, including fundamental breakdowns in FAA oversight at Southwest Airlines, have raised concerns about whether FAA's overall approach to safety oversight is effective and what changes are needed," Scovel testified.

These concerns were amplified by grounding of nearly 700 civil transports, which caused 4,198 flight cancellations, since FAA began industry- wide assessments of compliance with safety directives. "There is an urgent need to identify the root causes of safety problems and proactively examine how to maintain and ultimately enhance the margin of safety," he added.

The recent events at SWA drew national attention to serious lapses in FAA's oversight of air carriers and "the FAA's handling of whistleblower concerns regarding SWA's failure to follow a critical FAA airworthiness directive (AD) has had a cascading effect throughout the industry," he noted.

"While these safety lapses indicated problems with the airline's compliance, they are symptomatic of much deeper problems with FAA's oversight system.

"We found FAA's inspection office for SWA developed an overly collaborative relationship with the air carrier, which allowed repeated self- disclosures of AD violations through FAA's partnership program. These programs are intended to facilitate cooperation between FAA and air carriers to identify and address safety issues. Yet, FAA allowed SWA to repeatedly self-disclose AD violations without ensuring that SWA had developed a comprehensive solution for reported safety problems--which is required for FAA to accept the disclosure and absolve the carrier of any penalty.

"We also found that the events at SWA demonstrated weaknesses in FAA's national program for risk-based oversight--the Air Transportation Oversight System (ATOS). This allowed AD compliance issues in SWA's maintenance program to go undetected for several years. As early as 2003, one of the whistleblowers expressed concerns to FAA about SWA's compliance with ADs. In 2006, he began urging FAA to conduct system-wide reviews, but FAA did not begin these reviews until after the details of the March 2007 disclosure became public," the head of the DOT watchdog organization noted.

Government Industry

FAA Chief Apologizes for Gaps in Surveillance

Air Safety Week, April 21, 2008

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