Word: ntsb
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...meant leaving the airport-security report behind and unprotected. The dot was adrift, blown wherever the winds of a media event or crisis carried it. The Secretary offered no leadership, no knowledge or understanding, no accountability. The administrator of the FAA was a figurehead. Neither of them heeded NTSB recommendations; neither followed through on the many reports detailing safety problems at the FAA. Looking around the table at the meeting on the security report, I'd felt painfully defeated for the first time. I couldn't continue working in a place where all we did was sit around waiting...
...hardworking civil servants who have devoted their careers to aviation. They fly all the time, and so do their families and friends. Many FAA inspectors helped my office with investigations, reports and testimony before Congress. Senior FAA officials tried to reach compromises with my office and with the NTSB. But most of the time we pursued opposite goals...
...wanted peace with the Inspector General and the NTSB, but it wanted harmony by persuading us to lay off, to leave its officials to do their jobs as they always had. Planes are not falling out of the sky, the FAA kept saying. Aircraft are not crashing. Stated over and over, this agency mantra was a blanket justification for business as usual...
...Safety Board [the independent agency that investigates plane accidents] told the FAA to increase the distance between jets. The board studied 51 accidents caused by wake turbulence from 1983 to 1993. Twenty-seven people had been killed, and 40 planes had been damaged or destroyed. In those years, the NTSB repeatedly asked the FAA to set new rules, but the FAA refused. It would be three years more before the FAA ruled that the separation between heavy and lighter aircraft should be increased...
Since 1982, the NTSB has urged the FAA to order airlines to install better black boxes [the flight-data recorders that can provide clues to the cause of an accident]. All the NTSB wanted was black boxes that can continue recording for fractions of a second beyond a catastrophic explosion or massive electrical failure aboard an airplane. European airlines have used such advanced black-box technology for years. That means many American planes flying to Europe have the advanced boxes. But the FAA did not want to compel airlines to install improved boxes. No, the agency declared, the new technology...