Word: faa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NASA's longtime No. 2 man and now president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, last week released a firmly critical 118-page report that could lead to a major overhaul of the Federal Aviation Administration, the Government's principal agency for policing the skies. Its chief conclusion: the FAA, from the standpoint of technical depth and competence, simply is not up to the job of certifying as airworthy new aircraft that will fly 400 people at nearly the speed of sound seven miles above the earth...
...panel's report and 34 recommendations amounted to the most searching judgment on the FAA since it was reorganized 22 years ago to deal with problems and hazards of the commercial jet age. Highlights of the report...
...FAA's engineering staff, about 370 of whom are occupied with the certification of all new U.S. aircraft, are overwhelmed by the countless considerations that go into designing, building and testing a commercial airliner. In creating the wide-bodied L-1011 jetliner, for example, Lockheed submitted no fewer than 300,000 engineering sketches and 2,000 engineering reports. Says the panel: "FAA engineers cannot review each of the thousands of drawings, calculations, reports and tests, yet the agency must be certain that the design meets all the regulatory requirements...
...questioned some two dozen controllers, but a number of others were refusing to provide any information to the investigators except their names, ages and home addresses. Anthony Maimone, head of Local 160, insisted that human error or mechanical failure was to blame and accused the FAA of "blowing this thing out of proportion." Said a former PATCO official: "I just cannot believe that a controller who was not certifiably psychotic would do a thing like that." Whatever the case, said Gabriel Hartl, a spokesman for the Air Traffic Control Association, only an "act of God" averted a disaster...