Editor’s Notebook

FAA Oversight, Not Enough

At a time when the overworked and under-funded FAA can't possibly take on more work, the Department of Transportation's Inspector General's office released a report highly critical of the FAA's oversight of air carrier maintenance. The full report is available at www.AviationMx.com, then click on the Aviation Maintenance Resource Archive and look for the link to the DOT-IG Report on FAA Oversight.

The fundamental issue that the DOT-IG looked at is FAA "safety oversight of an air carrier industry in transition." The DOT-IG believes that the massive changes at airlines during the past four years are unusual enough that the FAA should have scrutinized airlines to make sure they weren't cutting corners on maintenance.

What is interesting about the report is that the DOT-IG is faulting the FAA not for lack of actual shoe-leather onsite visits to airline maintenance hangars and third-party maintenance companies but rather for the FAA's failure to adequately audit airline maintenance. The DOT-IG believes that "given the magnitude of changes occurring in the aviation industry and FAA's current budgetary and staffing challenges, FAA's oversight systems must be comprehensive, flexible, and data-driven to assure the public that safety will not be compromised and that limited inspector resources are used in an efficient and effective manner."

One of the DOT-IG's biggest complaints is that the FAA's inspectors have somehow been unaware of the changes in the airline industry, from bankruptcies at major airlines like US Airways and United Airlines, massive losses of money at Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and others, and rapid growth at low-cost carriers such as JetBlue Airways. The report doesn't say that the inspectors didn't notice these changes but faults the FAA's oversight system for failing to account for these changes. "This is a significant concern," the report stated, "in light of the fact that [the] FAA is expected to lose about 300 aviation safety inspectors this year and in FY 2006 is only requesting budget authority to replace 97 inspectors."

The DOT-IG report's objective was to assess whether the FAA's oversight systems are working for the purpose of monitoring safety at financially distressed and low-cost carriers "during periods of growth and change," according to the report. The researchers looked at five financially troubled network air carriers, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines, United Airlines, and US Airways and five low-cost carriers, AirTran Airways, ATA Airlines, Frontier Airlines, JetBlue Airways, and Spirit Airlines. The low-cost carriers were selected because they were experiencing growth, the report stated, although one can't help wondering why Southwest Airlines wasn't selected as that airline is still in growth mode.

The DOT-IG report implies that the FAA's ATOS and SEP data- and risk-analysis systems are not fulfilling their missions. Fifteen air carriers participate in ATOS (Air Transport Oversight System) and 112 in SEP (Surveillance and Evaluation Program), which is not as comprehensive as ATOS. SEP carriers are supposed to transition to ATOS someday, but this process is not progressing (another DOT-IG report complaint).

Basically, the DOT-IG is saying that the FAA's "trend analysis" of the air carrier industry is not working. There are not enough inspectors working with the ATOS and SEP systems, the processes for analyzing the data are weak, the system doesn't take into account massive industry changes, and the system does not identify areas of greater risk that should be evaluated more thoroughly.

The DOT-IG report is interesting reading but ultimately unsatisfying. The report does note that the FAA inspector workforce is shrinking and that the FAA is spending most of its resources (80 percent!) on air traffic control. This leaves little for the critical job of overseeing airline maintenance activities, especially airlines in financial difficulty.

No amount of tweaking a data-analysis system is ever going to replace the diligent FAA inspector who gets up at the crack of dawn to spend some time with the people who do the actual work on the airplanes. All a good inspector has to do is ask the right question to the right people. An honest answer will tell the inspector ten times more than any database.

So, my suggestion to the feds: continue to develop the data-driven analysis system but make sure it complements the inspectors who spend time in the field. Neither one can do the entire job of providing quality FAA oversight, but in combination, both systems may help improve safety.