Word: faa
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...airplanes that caused havoc for 300,000 passengers around the country last week won't continue into the heavy summer travel season. But the man charged with protecting federal whistle-blowers tells TIME he's got additional cases coming down the runway that could do just that. And the FAA warns that sloppy maintenance work - like that which resulted in the grounding of more than 3,000 American Airlines flights last week - could occur through the end of June as the FAA wraps up a two-phase inspection process...
...this scenario is the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The agency responsible for policing the safety of the nation's airlines has been under intense pressure over the last few weeks, ever since an investigation by the House Transportation Committee revealed in March that an FAA supervisor allowed Southwest Airlines to fly 46 planes that had missed inspections. Congress has been holding hearings on aviation safety, during which Robert Sturgell, the FAA's acting administrator, who is up for the permanent position, has had to answer charges, from whistle-blowers and lawmakers, of excessive coziness with and lax oversight...
...ordering American, the nation's largest carrier by revenue, to ground all of its MD-80s after finding that their wiring wasn't fastened precisely according to FAA rules. No one, including the FAA, is saying that any of these planes were unsafe to fly. But rather than allow American to ground a few planes at a time and phase in the fixes and re-inspections (as it had done just two weeks earlier), the FAA chose to ground all the planes at once. The agency has said that it's simply enforcing the rules, and American's CEO, Gerald...
...normal service by Sunday. A much bigger worry for every airline is fuel costs, which have doubled over the last year. That's what's behind the troubles of ATA, Skybus, Aloha and Frontier Airlines, which have all filed for bankruptcy protection within the last three weeks. The FAA is continuing its by-the-book campaign with audits of other airlines, but there may not be another inspection-related shutdown of this magnitude anytime soon, since no other carrier is as dependent on the MD-80 as American. Having made its point to the industry, the FAA can still choose...
...Unfortunately, stricter enforcement by the FAA - something that passenger advocates certainly welcome - will not necessarily mean a better summer travel season. Airlines are under even greater cost pressure than they were last summer, when one in three flights suffered delays. And changing the culture of the FAA so it's less reliant on airline self-regulation, as the Department of Transportation's Inspector General recommended this week, will require significantly increased funding for inspectors - something that's unlikely to happen by Memorial Day. Kate Hanni, who became an outspoken activist for a still-pending passenger's bill of rights after...