Study Calls FAA in Dark on Airline Safety

The Federal Aviation Administration has so badly mismanaged its inspection program that FAA officials “cannot say with assurance that airlines are complying with safety regulations,” the General Accounting Office reported Wednesday.

In one of the strongest indictments in years of federal air safety practices, the GAO portrayed FAA managers as being overrun by the proliferation of air carriers in recent years and ignorant about the frequency or results of inspections conducted by their own field inspectors.

FAA officials did not respond to the GAO’s sharp criticism but said that they would testify soon before the House Public Works subcommittee on aviation, the same panel that received the study by the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

Increase in Airlines

Herbert R. McClure, GAO associate director, told the subcommittee that the FAA’s chief problem is that it has failed to cope with the rapid increase in the number of airlines that occurred after government deregulation of the industry eight years ago.

“The magnitude could not have been known,” McClure said, adding that since 1978 the number of scheduled airlines has more than doubled to 500 and the number of aircraft has increased 45% to about 4,200.

He said the FAA “took few steps to monitor and deal with the impact of these increases on its inspection workload or staffing requirements.”

For example, McClure said, the agency “did not collect data on what inspections were or were not being performed or what the inspections showed.” Moreover, he testified, it “lacked standards for how to perform the various kinds of inspections and for how long inspections should take.”

He said that “the combination of not knowing what inspections were being done, how effective they were or how long they should take left FAA without the essential tools it needed to effectively manage its inspection workload.”

‘Failure to Respond’

Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), the subcommittee chairman, said the FAA’s “failure to respond to the new environment may have resulted in de facto deregulation of aviation safety itself.”

McClure said that current training for inspectors is inadequate, that their handbooks are “obsolete, incomplete or ambiguous” and that a computer system designed to improve inspector staffing has encountered serious problems.

He said his report was a follow-up to an investigation that the GAO undertook last summer when congressional criticism of alleged inspection flaws first surfaced. But he described the report as “preliminary,” saying final conclusions and recommendations would be presented to Congress in two months.

McClure did not single out any FAA official as chiefly responsible for the shortcomings. The agency’s current administrator, Donald D. Engen, has held office for two years.

In fact, in Senate hearings earlier this month, Associate Administrator Anthony J. Broderick cited some recent enforcement actions as evidence that the FAA is determined to keep close tabs on the airlines.

Eastern Fine Cited

Among those actions was a proposed $9.5-million fine against Eastern Airlines for alleged safety violations. Eastern, contending that most of the alleged infractions involved paper work, has refused to pay the full fine and has challenged the FAA to take court action.

McClure acknowledged that the FAA is starting to increase the size of its inspector force. But, even though it plans to hire more inspectors through the next fiscal year, he charged, the agency is “in such a hole . . . that it will be years before all the needed internal management controls, inspector training and supervisory managerial oversight will be in place to make full use of the manpower.”