The U.S. Department of Transportation recently unveiled 13 improvements to Federal Aviation Administration safety programs resulting from a months-long study, “Managing Risks in Civil Aviation: A Review of the FAA’s Approach to Safety,” conducted by a “blue-ribbon” panel of experts in the aviation field.
Some of the things in this plan are, well, sort of dumb — the kinds of things that make a person want to say “duh.”
For example:
Study Recommendation #2 – “The FAA should provide timely information about new AD [Airworthiness Directive] requirements, in advance of compliance dates, to all relevant FAA field offices. Those offices should then be responsive to any carrier that requests assistance in the form of progress-towards-compliance audits or reviews, in advance of the AD compliance dates.”
Translation: The FAA ought to tell interested parties right away that they’ve identified something that has an effect on the safety of an aircraft, and they should help them figure out how to get it fixed quickly if they’re having trouble.
Well what’s happening today? Shouldn’t Airworthiness Directives, by definition, be communicated quickly?
Study Recommendation #5 – “Voluntary Disclosure Reporting Program (VDRP) data have not been routinely analyzed at a higher level within the FAA.”
Translation I: We’re collecting data, but not doing anything with it.
Translation II: (Necessary because many may not know what the heck a VDRP is.) It’s a system where safety issues can be voluntarily and confidentially disclosed to the FAA. In their words, “The FAA depends heavily on voluntary disclosures and collaborative interventions to identify and mitigate risks. For these reasons we believe that these programs have even greater significance within the field of commercial aviation safety than in most other regulatory settings.”
If the data is so vital, why hasn’t someone figured out already — without the need of a “blue ribbon panel” — that looking at the collected information regularly is a good idea?
Study Recommendation #8 – “The FAA should explicitly focus on wide divergences in regulatory ideologies, where they exist, as a source for potentially serious error.”
Translation: All of the field inspectors should be singing out of the same hymnal.
Study Recommendation #12 – “The IRT would urge the FAA to embrace its own operational role in risk-identification and risk-mitigation as formally and energetically as it has embraced its role in overseeing industry’s Safety Management System (SMS) implementations; and to expedite its implementation planning in this area.”
Translation: The FAA has been busy making the airlines develop systems to keep a watch on their safety, but the FAA hasn’t developed its own system to watch the airlines. This translation will make more sense with a few well-placed quotes from the bowels of the full report:
A. With respect to the FAA’s oversight of industry’s SMS implementations, we note that the agency will have trouble meeting the International Civil Aviation Organization’s deadlines for rulemaking by November 2009.
B. We observe widespread confusion throughout the FAA regarding the nature of the FAA’s own operational role under SMS.
C. We do not believe the FAA stresses sufficiently its own potential to contribute to safety through the expansion and development of its own operational risk management capabilities.
D. The FAA is developing certain technical capabilities that will be pivotal to this operational role … and has begun the work of assembling the requisite analytic teams, but has paid less attention to the organizational challenges involved in structuring this work.
Study Recommendation #13 – “We recommend that without delay the FAA commission a time-and-motion study of its front-line inspection operation, to empirically assess the time-demands of [the Air Transport Oversight System] (ATOS) and other IT implementations. With the results of such a study in hand, agency leadership should establish some clear expectations regarding the proportion of an inspector’s workweek that data entry and other computer-related tasks should reasonably consume, and monitor progress towards more reasonable ratios as ATOS and other IT systems are improved over time.”
Translation I: It’s not our fault, it’s the computer’s.
Translation II: The FAA hasn’t looked at how an inspector’s time is spent and is completely unaware that only 30% of his or her time involves actual inspection of an aircraft. The remainder appears to be taken up by navigating cumbersome computer programs.
This “blue ribbon panel” only revealed what we already knew existed: lax oversight and poor management are rampant at the FAA. Can the taxpayers have our money back for that ridiculous study, please?
