Pena Asks Review of FAA Response to 757 Wake Issue : Aviation: Transportation Department’s probe follows reports that the agency knew of the danger involving planes trailing too closely before crashes in O.C., Montana.
U. S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena on Friday ordered a review to determine whether the Federal Aviation Administration waited too long before instituting new safety rules designed to prevent accidents caused by wake turbulence from Boeing 757 jetliners.
The announcement came five days after The Times, citing FAA internal documents, revealed that long before two aircraft accidents claimed 13 lives, the agency’s top scientist warned that air turbulence created by the jetliners would cause a “major crash” if the agency failed to require smaller planes to maintain a greater distance behind 757s.
“Serious questions have been raised regarding the timeliness of the agency’s actions over the past several years,” Pena said in a statement. “This review will evaluate whether FAA has the proper procedures in place to ensure that we are apprised of safety concerns at the earliest possible time, so appropriate action can be taken in a timely way.
“The traveling public entrusts its safety to this department,” he added. “Maintaining that trust and that responsibility is essential.”
FAA scientist Robert E. Machol expressed concerns about the threat posed by the wake of 757s as far back as 1990.
But it wasn’t until December--after the crash of a private jetliner in Santa Ana claimed the lives of five people--that FAA Administrator David R. Hinson issued a bulletin instructing air traffic controllers nationwide to routinely warn the pilots of smaller nearby aircraft of the hazard posed by the wake of 757s.
Reacting to recommendations made in February by the National Transportation Safety Board, the FAA’s Hinson announced in May an interim policy requiring controllers to increase from three miles to four the distance smaller planes should stay behind 757s during landings.
Although aviation experts disagree on the level of danger involved, the plane’s unique, fuel-efficient design creates invisible “horizontal tornadoes” emanating from each wingtip that are more powerful and last longer than those made by other aircraft its size.
The FAA has maintained that there was insufficient data to warrant a rule change earlier. But the agency issued its new policy with no new data other than the two fatal crashes and three serious incidents or near misses in the past 18 months.
A statement issued Friday by Hinson said: “I share the secretary’s concerns about the timeliness of the actions over the past several years regarding this issue, and the adequacy of the process used by the agency in considering those actions.
“The public,” Hinson said, “is entitled to be assured that the FAA has acted, and can act in the future, with appropriate speed when the facts warrant.”
The review, to be completed by July 22, will also examine whether the FAA adhered to the provisions of the federal Freedom of Information Act when the agency was asked to make public information in its files on the 757 issue.
Although The Times asked for access to FAA documents on 757 wake turbulence under the federal law in January, it wasn’t until May--after the newspaper appealed one agency rejection--that the FAA surrendered 226 pages of internal letters and memoranda, which showed that the agency knew about the 757 problem years ago from within its own ranks.
In addition to the documents provided by the FAA, The Times obtained from independent sources an Oct. 3, 1989, memo suggesting the agency was sensitive to public perceptions of the wake turbulence issue.
In the memo, addressed to two members of the FAA management staff, Machol wrote that he couldn’t understand why there weren’t more wake turbulence disasters, given the FAA’s wake turbulence policies. Across the top of the memo, someone had scrawled: “Bob: A note of caution--please watch your wording--I don’t want ‘smoking guns’ in our files.”
Hinson has directed an agencywide review of responses to FOIA requests.
Agency officials said The Times’ FOIA request appears to have been mishandled, though not deliberately, by lower-level employees.
Agency officials said the 757 wake turbulence review panel would be comprised of a small number of people from the FAA and the Transportation Department.
An agency official said the panel would ask: “When did the FAA know what it knew, how soon thereafter was it in a position to make a decision, and were those decisions made in a timely fashion?”
While it is not uncommon for the FAA to conduct its own reviews, agency officials said, it was unusual for Transportation Department officials to take part in such a review.
The Transportation Department is involved, one official said, to lend credibility to the review--”so it doesn’t look like the FAA looked at itself and said everything is all right.” Leo Garodz, a former FAA manager who expressed concerns about 757 wake turbulence to the FAA in 1991 as a consultant, welcomed Friday’s action.
“As I’ve said before, it sometimes takes a catastrophic event to get programs back on the front burner,” Garodz said. “That’s what happened here.
“It’s frustrating,” added Garodz, who was retained by the FAA in 1990 to test the level of 757 wake turbulence. “They hired me to do the wake vortex research. . . . We did it, we made recommendations, and nothing was done about it until now.”
The 757, a twin-engine narrow-body jet praised by pilots for its handling and safety, has flown for more than a decade.
It is unclear to those in the aviation industry why accidents and incidents involving 757 turbulence are a relatively recent phenomenon. Some have suggested it is because there are many more 757s flying, and because commercial pilots are increasingly being pressured to cut delays, which can often mean following closer behind aircraft than is advised.
The wake turbulence hazard is greatest during landings and take-offs, when smaller planes on an approach can inadvertently fall below the 757’s flight path and find itself entangled in a danger zone of hurricane-force winds. Even mid-sized passenger jets such as MD-80s, DC-9s and Boeing 737s, which can carry 100 passengers or more, have been violently “rolled” when they encountered 757 wake turbulence.
Turbulence from 757s is suspected of playing a part in two crashes of small aircraft that were landing in the wake of the sleek-bodied jets. Eight people died in a Billings, Mont., crash on Dec. 18, 1992. And five people, including two executives from the In-N-Out Burger chain, died in a Dec. 15, 1993, accident in Santa Ana. Eleven days before the Billings crash, Machol attended a special meeting with the FAA’s hierarchy and predicted a “catastrophe” due to 757 wake turbulence.
The FAA has said both pilots were flying under visual flight rules, which require a pilot to maintain a safe distance from a leading aircraft.
The FAA has resisted efforts to increase separation distances between large jets and tailing airplanes because it could potentially decrease the number of flights at the nation’s busiest airports. That could cut into revenue of the already financially hard-hit airline industry.
Hinson said in Friday’s statement the recently adopted four-mile separation and other 757 safety measures that take effect this summer “appropriately address safety issues” involving the 757. However, the agency has embarked on a two-year study of 757 wake turbulence to determine whether the four-mile separation distance is appropriate.
The Air Line Pilots Assn., the largest organization of pilots in the world, recently issued a bulletin advising pilots of smaller planes to stay five miles behind 757s to avoid the larger jet’s wake.
The British equivalent of the FAA, the Civil Aviation Authority, also has recently increased separation behind 757s after a 10-year study at London-Heathrow Airport showed the 757 was the culprit in a disproportionate number of wake turbulence incidents. Aircraft in the United Kingdom must stay four to six miles behind 757s, depending on the size of the trailing plane.
