Word: faa
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...plaudits for trying to buck the bureaucracy--for instance, by pushing last year to regulate commuter airlines in the same way as larger commercial airlines--reviews are mixed about Pena, who has been criticized for putting politics over safety, and about Broderick. In his nearly 20 years at the FAA, Broderick was a tough, respected administrator, and his supporters believe he is being sacrificed on the altar of public relations. But others claim that he could be unyielding and slow to acknowledge problems. For instance, it took two fatal crashes before he had the agency investigate wing-deicing difficulties...
Many aviation experts see this as a golden moment of opportunity for the FAA--and by extension, the flying public. There is talk of privatizing the agency, while some experts say they hope the agency exploits revolutionary technologies to improve flight safety, such as the enhanced ground-positioning warning system, which might have averted the December crash of an American Airlines jet in Cali, Colombia. Still, even if the FAA takes a more activist role rather than scrambling for cover after the next plane tumbles out of the sky, planes will fall. "We are dealing with machines and people...
ValuJet president Jordan vehemently defends this practice of outsourcing, saying it "has been done by the finest airlines. It is a sound concept; it is a good concept." This is true. But the drive to slash costs can sometimes lead to cut-rate care. The FAA has found that ValuJet contracted out all its maintenance to "geographically diverse low bidders" and that there were "multiple shortcomings" in the supervision of the firms. According to experts, the relationship between an airline and its maintenance teams must be symbiotic. "You need well-trained people, people whose morale is high," explains Louis Smith...
Outsourcing is here to stay, however, and last week the FAA conceded that it had been unprepared to handle the rise in "virtual airlines"--those assembled by contracting out various service components, from maintenance to reservations...
...would a seemingly vital federal agency be so unprepared? For one thing, the FAA is financially strapped, and has lost 5,000 employees since 1993. It has a constant shortage of inspectors, and rather than inspecting, they must devote increasing amounts of time to clerical tasks. Moreover, the agency continues to assign inspectors according to the size of an airline rather than the number of subcontractors it uses. The agency says it will change the way it monitors outsourcing, requiring stricter supervision and compliance in the future. "The regulatory climate is going to be quite changed," says John Strong...