Report From Washington

Commenting on FAA Proposals: A new web site lets you read and respond to the FAA’s many proposals. The site, www.regulations.gov, connects all federal docket systems. On it, you select "Federal Aviation Administration" to go to a section containing proposals for regulations, airworthiness directives (ADs), and advisory circulars (ACs). It supplies e-mail addresses to which you can send directly your agreement, disagreement, or suggestions on a docket. This is a much easier way to respond to a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) than the old way of mailing a letter in triplicate to Washington.

FAA Inspectors: The Professional Airways Systems Specialists, the union that represents FAA inspectors, said that it agrees with the urgent call by Representative John Mica (R-Florida) for more FAA inspectors. (See AM, March 2003, page 16.) Mica, chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, said demands of the job are too big for the 3,300 FAA aviation inspectors. PASS agrees, but said Mica’s figures are somewhat misleading. Of the 3,300 inspectors, the union said, only 2,800 are actually field inspectors. The rest are supervisory and desk people. (That number of field inspectors roughly splits evenly between operations and maintenance inspectors, but even that can be misleading because some are qualified to do both jobs.) PASS said there is an immediate need for 1,000 more field inspectors, with no need for any more desk people. The union said that need will grow as more inspectors retire and those remaining face increasing requirements for detailed checks of aircraft.

Mechanics Union Accused: Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents many airline mechanics, has blasted U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, claiming she has falsely depicted his union as corrupt. In an episode widely reported in the national media, Chao during a heated forum discussion at the recent annual meeting of the AFL-CIO in Florida pulled some papers from a file and began to charge that a number of IAM officials stole members’ dues money. In a full-page ad in The Washington Post, Buffenbarger said Chao had taken an incident out of context and tried to twist it. He said the IAM had discovered, during a routine internal audit, seven incidents of misused dues money, and that the officials responsible had been fired. The IAM had then notified the Labor Department about this problem. Buffenbarger said Chao used this incident of honest self-policing to imply that the Labor Department itself had uncovered some hidden union corruption. "The IAM," he said, "is rightfully proud of our reputation as a clean union."