FAA Issues New Safety Goals - NTSB Says Existing Risks Not Being Reduced

Air Safety Week, Nov 15, 2004

The NTSB perception of the risk is quite different, as was evident in the board's reclassification of its "Most Wanted" recommendation regarding runway safety. The FAA scorecard does not include the Aug. 19 near collision of an Asiana Airlines B747 and the Southwest Airlines [LUV] B737 at Los Angles International Airport (see ASW, Aug. 23). The Asiana jet roared over the Southwest jet, which had been cleared for takeoff on the same runway the Asian jet had been cleared to land.

"This highly visible incident was not reported," said NTSB Member Debbie Hersman. "It may suggest a deeper reporting problem."

The case also illustrates the relative ineffectiveness of the centerpiece system the FAA is deploying to reduce such hair-raising events - the AMASS, or airport movement area safety system. The AMASS at Los Angeles did not alert the tower controller until the Asian jet was within four tenths of a mile from the runway and the distracted controller, who was issuing another clearance, did not warn the Southwest pilots to cancel takeoff until 10 seconds later. The NTSB has called for a system that provides an alert directly to the pilots. Indeed, while intended to prevent accidents, AMASS recently caused an accident.

Target: Reduce cabin injuries from turbulence. The FAA had a target of not more than 18 such injuries for fiscal 2004, and the actual number was nine - with eight deemed serious. An FAA background paper said, "Only eight serious injuries have resulted from turbulence this year. We believe one of the factors for this below-average trends is that aircrews have been providing announcements to passengers related to turbulence that indicated an enhanced awareness of the risk." Accordingly, the FAA paper said, "The FAA is removing this performance target from the Flight Plan, although [turbulence injuries] will continue to be tracked."

However, the FAA database may significantly undercount the number of turbulence-related injuries. For the 40-week period from last February to the present, at least 33 cases of passenger and flight attendant injuries have been reported in the accident and incident table of this publication. At least 18 of these incidents involved serious injuries.

Target: Measure the safety of the U.S. civil aviation industry with a single, comprehensive index. The FAA has dropped back from the graphical prototype index featured prominently in last year's Flight Plan. Now, the FAA hopes to implement such a measure by fiscal 2006 - a one-year delay. The prototype, which used relative risk per flight hour, generated a range of criticism (see ASW, Sept. 15, 2003). On the negative side, the safety index was criticized for including too much in the bucket - cargo, international operations, general aviation, and so forth. Rather, the index would be more useful if "the system" were defined as Part 121 scheduled passenger operations in the national airspace system - U.S. airspace to U.S. certified airports, by U.S. airlines.

At the other end of the range of commentary, it was suggested that the prototype safety index was analogous to the Dow Jones index of stock performance. The Dow Jones embodies sub-indices of various industry sectors, and the same approach could be taken to measuring the safety of the aviation system, according to this school of thought. This kind of tabulation would provide a more informed insight into the overall system's performance. For example, in addition to the FAA's goal of a single, comprehensive index of safety, it would be a straightforward exercise to disaggregate the data into the four major areas of operations: (1) scheduled passenger and cargo service (Part 121), (2) scheduled regional operations with planes of 10 or more seats (Part 121), (3) scheduled flights in aircraft with nine or fewer passenger seats and unscheduled aviation operations (Part 135), and (4) general aviation (Part 91).