There's a cop on this beat, but the evidence suggests the Federal Aviation Administration has sometimes worried more about inconveniencing airlines than about aggressively safeguarding passengers. During a hearing Tuesday on last year's regional carrier crash near Buffalo that killed 50 people, the National Transportation Safety Board criticized the FAA for repeatedly ignoring safety recommendations and for not cracking down hard enough on regional carriers to make sure pilots are up to the job.
Not that the major airlines are blameless. An investigation by USA TODAY's Gary Stoller showed that airlines, including the majors, flew at least 65,000 flights over the past six years when maintenance deficiencies should have kept those planes grounded. Are the airlines cutting corners to save a buck, or are they just too sloppy to ensure work is done properly? Either answer is a bad one.
The FAA eventually caught up with violators and fined them. But that's hardly reassuring. The agency punishes only the violations it manages to find out about, and even when that happens, a lot of potentially risky trips can occur before it acts. Southwest flew more than 60,000 flights in 2006 and 2007 without doing mandatory inspections for fuselage cracks, a cause of past crashes. The FAA ultimately fined Southwest, but only after agency whistle-blowers told Congress that superiors were coddling the airline.
The Air Transport Association, the group that represents major U.S. airlines, defends their safety record — which has in fact been very good in recent years — and notes that there have been no maintenance-related passenger fatalities among its members since January 2000.
But there have been some hair-raising incidents related to shoddy maintenance, including a United 737 that returned to Denver in April 2008 after shutting down an engine with low oil pressure readings. An inspection showed that in place of two required protective caps, there were shop towels — shop towels! — covering openings on the engine.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010...ne-costcutting-endanger-passenger-safety.html
Not that the major airlines are blameless. An investigation by USA TODAY's Gary Stoller showed that airlines, including the majors, flew at least 65,000 flights over the past six years when maintenance deficiencies should have kept those planes grounded. Are the airlines cutting corners to save a buck, or are they just too sloppy to ensure work is done properly? Either answer is a bad one.
The FAA eventually caught up with violators and fined them. But that's hardly reassuring. The agency punishes only the violations it manages to find out about, and even when that happens, a lot of potentially risky trips can occur before it acts. Southwest flew more than 60,000 flights in 2006 and 2007 without doing mandatory inspections for fuselage cracks, a cause of past crashes. The FAA ultimately fined Southwest, but only after agency whistle-blowers told Congress that superiors were coddling the airline.
The Air Transport Association, the group that represents major U.S. airlines, defends their safety record — which has in fact been very good in recent years — and notes that there have been no maintenance-related passenger fatalities among its members since January 2000.
But there have been some hair-raising incidents related to shoddy maintenance, including a United 737 that returned to Denver in April 2008 after shutting down an engine with low oil pressure readings. An inspection showed that in place of two required protective caps, there were shop towels — shop towels! — covering openings on the engine.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010...ne-costcutting-endanger-passenger-safety.html
