Regulation Policy

FAA Fails To Report Air-Safety Problems

The Federal Aviation Administration is charged with ensuring the safety of commercial passenger aircraft, among other duties. But recent events show it is not paying attention to its own data.

Last September, a twin-engine Continental Airlines flight leaving Houston experienced the disintegration of its left engine and had to return to the airport for an emergency landing. The incident was the sixth serious in-flight failure Continental had experienced with the same type of engine in 24 days.

Experts say that such a pattern emerging should have alerted FAA personnel. But it completely slipped by them.

  • Backed by powerful computers, mountains of data and a small army of inspectors, the FAA is supposed to spot and investigate such patterns.

  • But about 35 percent of FAA flight-standards inspectors admit that they report half or fewer of the problems or violations they find because it requires too much paperwork.

  • A review of so-called incident reports by the Wall Street Journal indicates that many of them are entered into the system with crucial data missing and some are miscoded.

  • Last year, for instance, the names of component manufacturers were omitted from 89 percent of the records in the FAA's database of so-called service difficulty reports.

"These aren't little Mickey Mouse recordkeeping things," says a General Accounting Office investigator. "The FAA's ability to evaluate problems is hampered.."

"It's a concern that we didn't pick up on it," says the FAA's Houston inspector for Continental, referring to the previous five incidents of in-flight engine failures. The FAA's acting director of flight standards says he is confident Continental was operating safely and the Houston office wasn't negligent, but that the series of failures probably merited closer attention.

"They have all this reporting and they don't do anything with it," comments one expert.

Source: Scott McCartney, "FAA Data Deficiencies Hamper Effort to Spot Airline

Safety Hazards," Wall Street Journal, July 27, 1998.

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