Matters of Church and State

FREQUENTLY WRONG; NEVER IN DOUBT

          This morning’s New York Times carried an opinion piece, “A Back Seat for Safety at the FAA,” that fairly jumped off the page as I was reading it over breakfast in the wee hours of the morning.

         Written by the former Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, the piece alleges that the FAA has gotten too cozy with the industry it is supposed to regulate and, as a result, safety has suffered.  Nothing could be further from the truth and the accidents statistics bear that out.

         The last fatal commercial airline accident happened more than four years ago – on February 12, 2009, to be precise – when a Colgan Airways plane, en route from Newark, N.J. to Buffalo, N.Y. slammed into a house, killing all 49 on board and one person in the house.  Tragic as that was, it happened more than four years ago, which is a phenomenal record.

         Just reflect on that for a minute.  It means transporting billions and billions of passengers – the equivalent of flying the entire U.S population, over and over again, in all kinds of weather – without anyone suffering so much as a scratch.

         This safety achievement didn’t happen by accident.  And, make no mistake, the FAA had a major role to play in this achievement.

         When I came to the FAA in 1974 as a public information officer, major commercial airline accidents were commonplace. Routinely, I had to call home to tell my wife that I would be working late fielding calls on this or that airline accident.  Then, over the years, as new technology and improved procedures were introduced, gradual safety improvements were made.  But, most of these improvements came as a result of a “forensic approach” to safety during the “fix and fly” period.

 

         The forensic approach means that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) goes to the accident scene and sifts through the smoking wreckage, looking for the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, and searching for other clues as to what might have happened.  Then, weeks or even months later, the Board determines a probable cause and recommends such and such improvements.

         It’s no wonder that these technology improvements were grimly dubbed “tombstone technology.”

         But, using the forensic approach only hit a wall when all the “low hanging fruit” had been picked clean.  Accidents no longer seemed to happen for predictable causes or in bunches, but increasingly became random and unpredictable.  The FAA focus then began to shift in the direction of preventing accidents before they occurred.  This required a dicey, politically risky regulatory shift on the part of the FAA because members of Congress and the general public like regulatory agencies to use the “tough guy” approach to enforcement.  It makes them feel better.  The problem is that it only gets us so far.

         There was and still is a place for strict enforcement, to be sure, but relying solely on the “tough cop” approach was driving underground critically needed information that the industry possessed but was afraid to divulge to the FAA.   FAA inspectors recall going into airline maintenance shops and seeing signs on the walls warning, “Don’t Talk to the FAA.”

         This led to a courageous political decision by the FAA leadership at the time to begin working more closely with industry to tease out the information needed to prevent accidents before they happened.  And it has paid huge safety dividends. “Working together” is not necessarily a synonym for “cozy.”

         So when you read Op Ed pieces like the one in today’s New York Times, don’t be deceived by seemingly authoritative titles and automatically take so-called expert opinions at face value.  Experts of all stripes can be wrong as we frequently see in so many spheres of our public life.  As President Kennedy learned after the Bay of Pigs debacle, be careful of experts.

 

         They’re frequently wrong but never in doubt.

Jerry