Clean Air, FAA Style

It will be months before federal air-safety authorities finish their investigations into the Aug. 31 air collision over Cerritos and come up with their final package of proposals concerning how to reduce the chances of such tragedies happening again. However, hearings by the National Transportation Safety Board already are confirming public suspicions that the air-traffic-control system is in a dangerous state of disrepair.

Controllers who handle air traffic into and out of Los Angeles International Airport defend the system as fundamentally safe. But they told the board a disturbing story of outmoded radars that experience frequent breakdowns and, even when they are operating, do not always provide visible displays of small aircraft within their field of coverage.

Meanwhile, post-Cerritos investigations by The Times and others have uncovered a pattern of overly relaxed enforcement of air-safety rules against small-plane pilots who stray into the Terminal Control Area (or TCA) surrounding LAX where the collision between an Aeromexico jet and a private aircraft killed 82 people three months ago. Despite hundreds of such infractions, only 19 pilots were subjected to temporary suspension of their pilots’ licenses during the five years preceding the Cerritos tragedy--and not a single pilot certificate was permanently revoked by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The need for tougher enforcement, as well as for stricter checks on pilot competence, is manifest. The FAA, which has been accused of lethargy in the past, is beginning to move. Officials in the Western regional office are stepping up their efforts to spot and apprehend pilots who fly into the Terminal Control Area around LAX without radio clearance. They promise that more offenders will lose their licenses.

The regional office of the FAA also is proposing that all aircraft operating within a 30-mile radius of the Los Angeles TCA be equipped with transponders that give controllers their altitude as well as their horizontal location.

Although air-safety problems are more intense in Southern California than in most other places because of the concentration of airplanes and airports, the pattern of inadequate air-traffic-control equipment and lax enforcement efforts is not unique to this area. The problems are nation-wide, and so must be many of the solutions.

The requirement for altitude-encoding transponders, for example, should be applied in all areas with significant movements of passenger-carrying airlines. That in turn would facilitate the adoption of a workable collision-avoidance system that would warn airline pilots when they are on a collision course with another airplane--and tell them what evasive action is required.

Air travel is never going to be as safe as it can be, however, until the Administration and Congress make up their minds to spend more money on air safety. The first step is to unlock the $4.3-billion aviation trust fund, already collected from taxes on aircraft fuel and airline tickets, in order to speed up the process of buying new radars and hiring more air-traffic controllers and safety-enforcement personnel.

At present the Administration, with the connivance of Congress, is holding back on expenditures from the fund in order to make the federal budget deficit look a little smaller than it really is. Considering the urgent need for modernizing the air-safety system, this form of budget gamesmanship can no longer be tolerated.