Aircraft Maintenance Woes
Associated Press
William Voss is a longtime safety expert who has held senior posts with the Federal Aviation Administration and the International Civil Aviation Organization. He is now the president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, an independent watchdog organization based in suburban Washington. He recently spoke with Conde Nast Traveler's Senior Aviation Correspondent Barbara S. Peterson about the groundings that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers, prompted by revelations that Southwest Airlines had been permitted by FAA minders to fly aircraft without performing mandated maintenance fixes. American, Delta, and United later underwent inspections for compliance with a required fix of the wiring bundles in the engines of their MD-80s.
CNT: A few weeks ago, air travel in the U.S. was severely disrupted by a wave of maintenance-related groundings at major airlines. Was it necessary to take hundreds of aircraft out of service with virtually no notice? Were there really any safety-of-flight issues here?
VOSS: There is no question that the FAA had a management problem with one of its offices in the southwest region. What happened at Southwest Airlines was clearly a case of a small group of people going way too far in terms of leniency with the airline they were supposed to be monitoring. But what followed was a fairly substantive audit by the FAA of the whole operation, which found that compliance [at Southwest] was actually pretty good. And there wasn't a pattern of other violations. Keep in mind that the FAA issues thousands of safety directives every year, and in the particular one that caused the groundings of the American and Delta planes, the companies had been given a year and half to comply.
CNT: So it wasn't a case of these airplanes being unsafe to fly? And if so, shouldn't the FAA have given them more time to do the inspections?
VOSS: From a safety perspective, I'm at a loss to explain the reason behind the groundings. It wasn't on the level of an emergency. This is more a compliance and quality control issue. But the actions sent a message of a crisis, which it certainly was not. But the FAA may have had other reasons . . . they were in a no-win situation. If they allowed [carriers] to continue to operate as usual, they'd be accused of being too close to the airlines, and if they didn't, they would be (and were) criticized for overreacting.
CNT: But how are travelers supposed to feel when the planes they were supposed to fly on are grounded for safety reasons? Doesn't it send the message that this is an emergency?
VOSS: The traveling public should not feel they were flying around in time bombs. They were definitely not in danger. After all, these weren't incredibly old planes, and they are maintained on a rigid inspection schedule.
CNT: There's been a lot of talk lately about airlines farming out repairs to off-shore maintenance facilities that can do the work less expensively. Did that play a part in the recent inspections?
VOSS: It's an election year, and everyone is taking every opportunity to debate NAFTA all over again. Moving jobs overseas is a hot issue. But aircraft manufacturing is a truly global industry. Airplane components are manufactured all over the world, and it is rarely a bad idea to go back to the factory that produced the part [for repairs]. The legitimate question here is: Is there sufficient oversight of these repair stations around the world? The FAA probably does more oversight of these stations than any other country in the world.
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