Audits Reveal Need to Strengthen Safety Management Programs

Air Safety Week, Dec 18, 2000

Airlines encouraged to share data among each other to raise industry safety, and to forestall regulatory intervention

Safety programs at major U.S. carriers tend to work in isolation, both internally within the corporate structure of each airline, and in isolation among carriers. The fragmentation hinders effective identification of safety hazards, and the sharing of safety-related trends in the industry as a whole.

While there are numerous isolated examples of excellence, systemic shortcomings in safety-related management and surveillance programs need to be corrected.

These are the principal findings of a so-called National Program Review, the initial phase of which recently was completed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). "This is the first time we've wandered in to look at these programs," said Nick Lacey, director of the FAA's flight standards service. Actually, the expression "wandered in" may not capture the importance of the activity, which marks a top-level effort to make sure that the kind of stark deficiencies found in Alaska Airlines' [ALK] safety management programs earlier this year are not endemic to the industry. The National Program Review is a first in the sense that the FAA has reviewed three non-required safety programs as well as one mandated by regulations.

Birth of the National Program Review

After the fatal January 31 crash of an Alaska Airlines MD-83, federal inspectors undertook an extensive audit of the carrier's maintenance and operations practices and found deficiencies that called into serious question the airlines' ability to safely maintain its airplanes. The carrier was given the choice of conducting a comprehensive internal reform or, failing that, to be stripped of authority to conduct heavy maintenance of its airplanes. In this eventually, the carrier faced incremental grounding as airplanes came due for heavy maintenance at the rate of about 5-6 airplanes per month (see ASW, June 12).

The carrier developed a multi-step action plan to correct these deficiencies. At the same time FAA officials conditionally approved Alaska's reform plan, they announced that the other nine of America's ten largest carriers would be subjected to similar audits (see ASW, July 3). Those inspections, begun last July, were completed over a 66-day period ending September 22. General results were announced last week. More specific reports on each of the nine carriers will be revealed in January. This extra time was allowed to provide the airlines with an opportunity to challenge alleged inaccuracies and to develop remedial safety action plans of the type now underway at Alaska Airlines.

Alaska has been through four milestones of its implementation plan. "Thus far, all four have gone well," Lacey said. America West Airlines [AWA] was among the first three of the nine inspected after Alaska. The carrier has bridled at media reports of an impatient Lacey grousing that the carrier was "at the end of the rope".

Lacey explained last week the progress at America West "was not moving at the pace we were expecting."

Overall Findings

Regarding the nine major carriers, Lacey said the audits did not turn up vacancies in key safety positions, such as some key billets at Alaska that had gone unfilled for as long as two years. Another primary point of concern at Alaska was the unsatisfactory state of the carrier's Continuing Analysis and Surveillance System (CASS). The need to correct this program was mentioned repeatedly in the FAA's "show cause" letter to Alaska Airlines last summer (see ASW, June 12 and July 10).

Shortcomings - to varying degrees - in CASS programs at the other nine carriers headed the FAA's list of concerns. CASS was one of four safety management programs examined during the course of the National Program Review. The other three were the Reliability Program, the Internal Evaluation Program (IEP), and the Safety Program. Of these, only CASS currently is required by FAA regulation.

Lacey said that almost certainly "some enforcement actions" (i.e., fines) will be proposed as a result of these reviews. The agency recently levied proposed fines on Alaska totaling nearly $1 million (see ASW, Dec. 11). However, the National Program Review was not undertaken with the view to finding violations, but to generate a broader assessment of the rigor of the carriers' safety practices, and to determine the overall effectiveness of their safety management programs.

Above all, the audits were undertaken to ensure that the situation found by dismayed federal officials at Alaska Airlines did not exist at other carriers.

Pockets of Excellence

The audits documented numerous "best practices," or particular activities that merit emulation throughout the industry. Lacey cautioned, however, that these practices do not necessarily add up to "best programs." They represent only the distinct pieces. Indeed, no single carrier swept all four programs with one or more best practices in each category. Nonetheless, in the most important CASS program, Delta Air Lines [DAL] dominated with the greatest number of best practices. Indeed, the carrier, just one of nine, garnered a third of the kudos in this important area. In the reliability program category, Northwest Airlines [NWA] had the second highest concentration of best practices.