Better FAA Response to Data Requests Urged
A federal panel Tuesday recommended an overhaul of Federal Aviation Administration handling of Freedom of Information Act requests after it determined that the agency wrongly withheld potentially incriminating documents on wake turbulence caused by Boeing 757 jetliners.
Either deliberately or through ineptitude, officials within the FAA mishandled an FOIA request by The Times, at least in part because the FAA’s FOIA process is sloppy and mismanaged, a joint FAA and Department of Transportation panel concluded in a report.
Just days after a fatal crash on Dec. 15, 1993, in Santa Ana, The Times filed an information request with the FAA as it sought to determine how much the FAA knew about the potential danger of 757 wake turbulence and how long it had known it.
The crash, which killed all five people aboard a Westwind corporate jet, occurred as the plane followed a 757 as both prepared to land at John Wayne Airport. It was the second fatal crash in a year involving a smaller plane landing behind a 757. The previous accident in Billings, Mont., claimed eight lives.
After withholding the records for months, the FAA in May turned over 226 pages of documents, letters and memoranda to The Times. Among other things, the documents revealed that the agency’s former chief scientist, Robert E. Machol, had repeatedly issued warnings on the “horizontal tornadoes” caused by 757s, including a prediction on Dec. 7, 1992, that a “major crash” could occur if the agency did not take action. The Billings accident occurred 11 days later.
Those documents were initially withheld in part because the person who handled the FOIA request mistakenly believed the agency did not have to release documents considered “controversial” to the public, the report said.
The FOIA generally provides that upon written request any person may have access to any record in the possession of any federal agency, and in a timely fashion. Information can be withheld in specific instances, but the exemptions are specific and narrow, such as in the interest of national security.
In fact, on Tuesday, the FAA released several thousand additional pages of documents on the topics of 757 wake turbulence and wake turbulence in general.
The newly released materials establish that Machol, who retired earlier this year, first raised concerns about 757 wake turbulence as far back as mid-1989.
The documents also revealed that the Air Line Pilots Assn. on April 29, 1988, wrote a letter to the FAA expressing concerns about the issue because several pilots had reported potentially dangerous encounters with 757 wake turbulence. ALPA requested FAA wake turbulence tests on the 757 and other aircraft.
According to the DOT-FAA panel’s report, the FAA never responded to ALPA. Only in the fall of 1990 did the FAA initiate wake turbulence studies on the 757.
The panel said it could not determine whether those in the agency’s System Technology Division who withheld the information from The Times did so deliberately or out of sheer ineptitude. And though the agency receives some 6,000 FOIA requests each year, the panel found the FAA’s FOIA procedures in general sorely lacking.
“Both staff and management tend to view FOIA requests as bothersome interruptions that are to be handled quickly and as easily as possible,” the report said. Those who handle FOIA requests for the FAA are misinformed or uninformed on correct procedures, and their responses to FOIAs are not reviewed by their superiors for “timeliness, accuracy,” or “completeness,” the report said.
Saying the FAA’s credibility was at stake, the panel recommended what amounts to a nearly complete reorganization of the FAA’s FOIA procedures.
