Airline Safety Is in a Nose Dive, and Must Be Pulled Up

Our U.S. airline industry is in trouble. The overall margin of safety, the airlines’ lifeblood of existence, is decreasing under the cost-cutting pressures of unfettered competition.

Certainly it has not become unsafe to fly. In fact, it is still the safest method of moving around the country or the world. But airline flying is decidedly less safe than it should be these days, and demonstrably less safe that it was before 1978.

Don’t look for the proof of this in the accident statistics, for they are virtually useless in measuring the potential for airline crashes.

Instead, one finds the proof in the reports of cutbacks and violations, even among the larger carriers; the congressional testimony of safety experts, pilots and maintenance people that standards are slipping; the galvanizing internal Federal Aviation Administration memos of widespread noncompliance with the rules; the shutdown of various airlines, and the fare wars involving ticket prices that seem too good to be true--and are exactly that.

The problem is human nature. The airline business is run by, managed by and operated by humans who certainly want to fly safely. But they also must make enough money to stay in business in order to fly anywhere--safely or otherwise. When spending the money for maintenance, training and operational safety comes into conflict with the need for economic survival, the margin of safety gets compressed.

It was not supposed to turn out that way. Before the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act in October, 1978, the now-defunct Civil Aeronautics Board governed the airline industry like a benevolent dictator, setting routes and fare structures and refusing to let airlines price their product below cost. As a result, airlines enjoyed almost a guarantee of profit. That in turn led to ever-fatter union contracts and bloated, inefficient managements.

It also led--according to such free-market advocates as Cornell University economics Prof. Alfred Kahn, considered the father of airline deregulation--to overinflated ticket prices.

But what neither Kahn nor Congress understood was that within those supposedly bloated ticket prices lurked the beating heart of airline safety--the costs of multimillion-dollar maintenance and training bases, spare parts and state-of-the-art simulators, as well as the cost of a mature, seasoned, experienced work force of professional aviators, mechanics and managers. These were the costs of stability and safety, and they were costs that were affordable only because they could be passed on to the customer in fares that were the same for each airline.

Suddenly, under deregulation, established airlines found themselves penalized when they spent any more money on safety than their lowest-cost competitors. Within a few years of passage, ill-prepared new-entry carriers were springing up like weeds in an untended garden, skimming off the most profitable routes of the established carriers and undercutting their prices with cost structures that included only minimal allowances for maintenance and training.

The effect was quite predictable. Management, faced with a lower-cost barrier, had to slash its costs as well--not only the salaries but the cost of the operation itself. Thus everything, including maintenance and training, is scrutinized for places to cut.

There are, of course, minimum standards mandated by the FAA. But those minimums were never meant to be the average. Before deregulation, in fact, the industry operated far, far above those FAA minimums, and did so voluntarily.

In deregulating, however, Congress failed to understand this, and merely assumed that the FAA could keep the safety level from slipping.

Not that the underfunded and understaffed FAA isn’t trying. But the recent FAA allegation against Eastern Airlines of 7,800 violations of the minimum standards, for example, is proof of the FAA’s incapability to control the system: If routine FAA enforcement were adequate, Eastern would never have had the chance to amass such a list of alleged shortcomings.

In fact, the Eastern case also shows with frightening clarity the extent to which a well-meaning management, dedicated to safety, can nevertheless inadvertently let the incredible cost pressures of deregulatory competition compromise its standards.

Today Gramm-Rudman’s shadow hangs like an executioner’s sword over the FAA’s last vestige of ability to keep up with a system gone berserk. That must be changed. The FAA needs an immediate threefold increase in funding in order to hire more inspectors and significantly increase its monitoring of the industry; the President needs to appoint a blue-ribbon commission to figure out how badly we’ve damaged this airline system and how to repair it, and at the very least we need a re-regulated floor under prices that airlines can charge. Complete free-market deregulation has proved itself dangerous by definition--airlines must be denied the freedom to price themselves into cost-cutting frenzies that compromise passenger safety.