Word: faa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...implications, I frequently asked about these elusive valuations and talked to many people who had heard about them or knew someone who knew someone who had heard about them. Yet I never met anyone who had actually seen the official figures, much less helped compile them. In many meetings, FAA officials argued as if they had those figures on the tips of their tongues--"losses," they would explain patiently, from the small number of crashes and even smaller number of attacks on planes just did not justify vast airline investments in safety and security. After all, as the FAA...
...regulate by counting tombstones," an FAA official told a journalist a few years ago. The nickname's origins are unknown, but by the time I joined the Department of Transportation, even people who worked for the FAA cynically called it the Tombstone Agency. Within the Washington Beltway, agency officials, government bureaucrats, staff on Capitol Hill, aviation lobbyists, airline representatives and journalists all understood the poignant irony of this nickname. The FAA will not do anything until people die. It was a sad, bad, inside joke. Only the public never knew how much truth...
...became the watchdog of the FAA. The FAA, in turn, stood guard over the airlines. But that role could be interpreted two ways: as policing the airlines to ensure safety at all costs or as protecting the airlines from any opposition or criticism. During five years as Inspector General, I came to realize that the FAA believed the statutes ordered it to champion the aviation industry...
...that would shock the public: sloppy inspections of planes, perfunctory review of pilots, lax oversight of airline procedures, disregard for bogus airplane parts, sievelike security at airports, antiquated air-traffic-control systems. Only with a major crash, only with people dead and sobbing survivors filling television screens, does the FAA step up to the plate and make changes. I found the FAA's complacency toward accidents difficult to accept...
...French-Italian plane become violently uncontrollable in cold weather. Pilots and aeronautical engineers knew what the problem was: the de-icing boots on the ATR wings were not big enough. Those are the rubber sleeves on each wing that can be expanded to crack sheets of ice. But the FAA determined that lengthening the boot would cost too much money. It took three plane crashes, the third one scattering human remains and debris over eight acres of Indiana farmland on Halloween, before the FAA ordered extension of the deicing boot and limits to ATR flights in icy weather...