I attended the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation Infrastructure hearing last month regarding Southwest Airlines and the FAA. The hearing was riveting.

Something is amiss at the FAA in terms of dealing with serious safety issues, not to mention personnel problems.

A summary of the facts states, "On March 15, 2007, Southwest Airlines (SWA) notified the FAA of a voluntary disclosure of a potential non-compliance with the Airworthiness Directive (AD) related to aging aircraft skin cracks and that up to 100 aircraft were overdue for the required inspection. SWA submitted its formal VDRP application on March 19, 2007 on a total of 47 of these aircraft. These aircraft were brought into compliance by March 23, 2007. However, the FAA’s SWA CMO [Certificate Management Office] and the airlines failed to ground these aircraft between March 15 and March 23. SWA continued to fly the aircraft in passenger revenue service in direct violation of the AD and Federal Regulations. The FAA SWA CMO management closed the VDRP on April 10, 2007." What it doesn’t say is that some FAA inspectors allege that another FAA supervisor gave SWA the OK to continue flying the aircraft.

Committee Chair James Oberstar used this phrase: "malfeasance bordering on corruption" to describe the situation with the inspector who allowed the airline to continue flying the aircraft in question at SWA. There were also allegations that the FAA inspector used non-approved methods as a way to warn SWA of potential violation-inducing situations rather than the traditional letter of investigation. Several inspectors in that office described an alignment of the office between those who were in agreement with the person who allowed SWA to continue flying and those who were not in agreement. This was on ongoing adversarial relationship. Allegations were made that some FAA inspectors were threatened by others in that FAA office. One inspector literally had to hold back tears when describing how he, his family and his livelihood were threatened.

One thing became evident during the hearing as one after another FAA employee went up the chain of command to alert their superiors to the unhealthy relationship both within the CMO office and with SWA. Something is amiss at the FAA in terms of dealing with serious safety issues, not to mention personnel problems. The previous manager of the SWA CMO stated that he tried to take his concerns about the supervisor, resulting from complaints from several inspectors, up another level to his supervisor. He stated that the supervisor in question’s "lapse of judgment did not seem to resonate with him. At this point I was wondering what it would take to get [my supervisors] to take seriously the problem...this added to my suspicion that [the supervisor] was being protected for some reason and increased my uneasy feeling that I could possibly wind up being the victim instead." Ultimately, that manager was abruptly removed from his position as manager of the SWA CMO.

Even the former supervisor of the geographic unit, whose office is designed by the FAA as a separate work unit to ensure, from a supervisory standpoint, the geographic unit was independent of the PMI and other inspectors, said the appropriate action to an AD over flight such as the one at SWA "should be clear to any journeyman FAA inspector." He went on to say, "I was flabbergasted and shocked when a regional office-mandated management team building exercise in late 2006 resulted in a requirement that each management team member sign an agreement to professionally cooperate with each other on office matters. I interpreted this to mean that the real source and scope of serious differences on safety and regulatory compliance-related matters was not being acknowledged." He was reassigned too.

At the request of the committee, the Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Transportation, reviewed the FAA’s handling of the concerns. "We found that FAA’s Southwest inspection office developed an overly collaborative relationship with the air carrier, which allowed repeated self-disclosures of AD violations through its partnership program," said Inspector General Calvin Scovel III at the hearing. "FAA’s oversight in this case appears to allow, rather than mitigate, recurring safety violations"