Head of FAA Says Airlines Need to Promote Vigilance

Voicing concern over the “routine professionalism” of commercial flight crews, T. Allan McArtor, the new head of the Federal Aviation Administration, said Sunday that the nation’s airlines need to promote more vigilance about cockpit safety procedures.

The agency chief also defended his recent crackdown on general aviation planes at Los Angeles International Airport, saying federal officials must assert more control over the region’s crowded airspace and keep smaller planes farther away from commercial flights.

McArtor, suggesting that the Aug. 16 crash of a Northwest Airlines flight in Detroit may have been caused by human error, said he will meet this week in Kansas City with the nation’s airline pilot leaders and urge them to launch “a total, top-to-bottom reassessment” of pilot training and crew coordination procedures.

“We’ve got to recapture the public confidence in our aviation system,” he said, noting that the flying public is concerned about its “exposure to risk. . . . I think we have to make sure that our pilots are trained, that they’re totally vigilant, that they’re professional.”

Federal investigators have suggested that the Detroit air crash, which claimed at least 155 lives, may have been caused by pilot error. Some evidence at the site has indicated that the plane’s wing flaps were not properly extended during takeoff, which probably would have deprived it of the lift needed to fly, investigators said.

McArtor expressed anger over a weekend report in the Detroit Free Press that airline crews frequently disconnect a warning system that tells them the wing flaps are not extended. If true in the Detroit crash, he said, such action would have been “inexcusable. . . . That would have been incredible if that were the case.”

Looking beyond the Detroit crash, McArtor said a rash of recent airline mishaps have been caused by crew errors. In some of these incidents, he said, there may have been a breakdown in communications.

“You don’t land on the wrong runway or the wrong airport as a pilot . . . you do it as a crew,” he said on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

Support From Pilots

McArtor got strong support from Capt. Henry Duffy, president of the Air Line Pilots Assn., who said many commercial airline crews are still adjusting to the automated--and sometimes disarmingly simple--technology in modern planes.

“Automation is a new problem that has to be dealt with, with new techniques and we’re working on those techniques,” Duffy said. Even though flight crews are “thoroughly trained,” he said, “complacency and boredom are enemies of aviation safety, just like weather is.”

McArtor was criticized, however, for the restrictions he placed last week on general aviation planes at Los Angeles International Airport. Under the plan, smaller aircraft flying through the area will have to avoid LAX airspace and instead use the unregulated airspace over eastern Los Angeles County.

John Baker, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., charged that the new plan is “patent PR work that has no relationship to reality.” The new rules “are going to kill people,” because they force smaller planes into a compressed airspace and invite collisions, he said.

Strained Workloads

Meanwhile, John Thornton, representing the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn., said the new FAA rules will add to the already strained workloads of the region’s air controllers. Whenever general aviation pilots wish to enter the newly restricted airspace, they will have to contact air controllers for permission, he said.

“You’ll have these small aircraft calling in for service, and you either bend over to accommodate that service, or you have to explain to them that you are unable to at this time . . . and it just increases the workload,” Thornton said.

McArtor and his critics agreed, however, that many of those problems--including a shortage of air traffic controllers and airport facilities--would be relieved if the federal government spent the nearly $6 billion in a special trust fund for aviation programs.

Baker and Duffy charged that the fund has been frozen for political reasons, to keep the federal deficit figure down. If President Reagan and Congress agreed to spend those funds, McArtor said, it would be an “extraordinary” shot in the arm for the nation’s aviation system.