The FAA and the airlines have been bragging that over the past decade air travel has been the safest ever due to a phenomenally low fatal accident rate. However, when nonfatal accidents are included, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) counts 26 accidents for 2006, the most recent year on its database. That’s an average of one accident every two weeks. If incidents are included, in which damage is minor (i.e., an accident that got lucky at the last second), the combined accident/incident rate is about two or more events per week. The record, for a highly regulated form of public transport, is hardly as laudatory as the FAA and industry proclaims.

Many FAA inspectors avoid filing a regulatory violation against an airline because of the additional work involved in preparing the paperwork, for which there may be scant office time. Enforcement action also puts the spotlight on the inspector, as the big airlines will often contest the violation. The violation package better be good, otherwise the inspector will have egg all over his face and the regional FAA office stands to be embarrassed if the agency has to stand down. In my career with the FAA as a maintenance inspector, I’ve known several inspectors who never filed a single violation. It takes only a year or two for a new inspector to figure out the supervisor’s or office manager’s disposition regarding regulations and compliance. A new and idealistic inspector is not going to change a soft office culture concerning enforcement of the regulations, if for no other reason than that it’s not the way to get promoted.

In my 20 years tenure with the FAA, complacency of PMIs resulted from long assignments with the same airline. Within FAA, we inspectors used to estimate the degree of favoritism by saying the PMI was either walking with the airline or sleeping with the airline. Headquarters answered this problem in the early 1970s with a program called System Worthiness Analysis Program (SWAP), in which a full-time team of regional inspectors, not assigned to any air carrier, conducted periodic audits of airlines.

SWAP teams received special training to conduct such audits, and in the first few years there were bitter arguments by principal operations inspectors (POIs) and PMIs against the SWAP inspection. This is due to the fact that the SWAP review usually uncovered special airline treatment given by the principal inspectors. It got so bad that special training sessions were conducted with POIs and PMIs and SWAP team members. Called “love in’s,” the sessions were intended to break down principal inspector animosity and a few instances of outright paranoia.

Here was the real weakness: SWAP teams could not write up airline violations; they had to pass the violation on to the principal inspector for his decision. I served on the Western Region SWAP team for two years and we did some good work. Even SWAP teams were spotty, though; a few were composed of deadbeat personnel and audit quality suffered.

The FAA later changed the SWAP name to NASIP (National Aviation Safety Program) and RAPSIP (Regional Aviation Safety Inspection Program), and about a decade later dropped these programs in favor of more airline self-reporting of problems.

Other programs that would give the FAA insight into the safety of an airline have been hobbled. The mandatory service difficulty reporting (SDR) program, which could give the FAA advanced warning of adverse trends, has been in the revision stage for years, still is not complete, and as a consequence the SDR system is widely regarded as little more than a bad joke and wildly variable in terms of reporting rigor, at best. Now the FAA engine reliability reporting program, showing powerplant operating trends (in-flight shutdowns and premature removals), has been dormant for the past 10 months, its future status uncertain. All too frequently, the FAA rationalizes away these programs by arguing that the manufacturers and airlines know better about what’s happening, and therefore the FAA can and does benefit from the sharing of vital information. This half-truth can rationalize and deflect critical functions back to industry as the FAA shrinks from, or shirks, its safety responsibility.

Now back to that supposed 10-year cycle of maintenance-related disasters. In each case, with a high probability, had the FAA performed its job more effectively the crashes and airplane write-off’s would not have taken place. In brief and simple explanation: the DC-10 engine change using a forklift to remove engine and pylon as a single unit was not a manufacturer-approved procedure; the Aloha B737 structural inspections were inadequate and the PMI was not aggressive in finding out why; the Alaskan MD-80 screwjack actuator procedure and the continuous analysis and surveillance system (CASS) were far below standard and allowed to continue by the PMI; and the American Airlines A300-600 rudder inspections – to Airbus standards – were later found inadequate and were never challenged by the PMI or by senior officials at FAA headquarters.

Southwest Airlines unknowingly and ironically brought the FAA’s wrath down on themselves. Also unknowingly, and to the good, the situation has prompted increased congressional oversight of an agency generally soft on regulatory compliance and enforcement of the airlines. The public posturing and media hype just might lead to increased inspections and surveillance, break the 10-year cycle, and forestall an accident waiting to happen. The question of the hour is this: why does it take a wave of bad publicity and an embarrassing congressional hearing to goad the FAA into doing the right thing it should have been doing all along?

(Bart Crotty is an airworthiness, maintenance, flight operations safety and security consultant with a previous career in the FAA providing maintenance oversight of the airlines. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )