FAA Promises Faster Action on Safety Issues : Airlines: Chief vows changes after disclosures about agency being warned about potentially fatal wake turbulence created by 757s.
Facing criticism for their handling of the Boeing 757 wake turbulence problem, federal aviation officials Thursday vowed to move more swiftly to alert those in the airline industry to potential safety hazards and announced new measures intended to prevent accidents.
The announcement marked the second time the Federal Aviation Administration has taken safety-related steps since it was disclosed that agency officials had been warned about the potential danger of wake turbulence created by 757s years before two fatal accidents claimed 13 lives.
Testifying before the House subcommittee on technology, environment and aviation, FAA Administrator David R. Hinson pledged that within 60 days his agency would review the role of its Office of Aviation Safety and create an efficient method to identify and act upon safety issues.
“I have asked specifically that they define management responsibility and accountability more clearly, so that we may be confident that safety issues are raised and receive appropriate priorities,” Hinson said.
Hinson said the agency has hired an official from RAND, a well-known think tank, whose top priorities will include ensuring that safety concerns raised by scientists and researchers within the FAA get a proper hearing inside and outside the agency.
And starting this weekend--at a convention of general aviation pilots in Oshkosh, Wis.--the FAA’s Flight Standards and Aviation Safety office will disseminate information to pilots on the wake turbulence issue, Hinson said. He said the agency also will quickly establish a process that makes certain that “emerging safety issues are addressed promptly and effectively.”
Hinson’s announcements came two days after an internal report concluded that the FAA may have mishandled the 757 wake turbulence issue because bureaucracy and poor communication sometimes compromised the agency’s ability to pinpoint and respond to potential safety problems in a timely fashion.
The internal report and Thursday’s hearing were prompted by a June 5 story in The Times, revealing that internal documents showed that the FAA had been warned about the 757 wake turbulence hazard by its chief scientist, Robert E. Machol, starting in 1989. Eleven days before the first of two 757 turbulence-related fatal accidents, Machol had predicted to FAA managers that a “major crash” would occur if the agency failed to take actions to protect planes, especially smaller ones, landing behind 757s.
Subcommittee members Thursday repeatedly expressed concerns that the FAA could--and should--have acted sooner on the 757 turbulence issue.
At a minimum, most appeared to believe that the agency should have publicly drawn attention to the problem sometime between the first fatal accident in Billings, Mont., in December, 1992, and the second, in Santa Ana, in December, 1993. The Billings crash took eight lives; the Santa Ana crash killed five people, including the top two officials of the In-and-Out Burger chain.
Both accidents happened after private aircraft encountered wake turbulence from 757s landing in front of them--the very scenario Machol had laid out beforehand.
In his testimony at Thursday’s hearing, Machol, who retired from the FAA on April 30, said there was “nothing brilliant about any of these predictions. There (were) very good, solid reasons” for them, he said.
But the blunt-spoken, former college professor portrayed the FAA as being the victim of a “bureaucratic stasis that sometimes gets in the way of anything useful” being achieved.
“We have a situation where someone who seems to know what he’s talking about made a prediction that a cataclysmic accident could happen,” said subcommittee member Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, (R-Huntington Beach). Although the FAA often does its job well, Rohrabacher said, “the way they did it in this particular case . . . perhaps cost the lives of some innocent people.”
Asked at one point by Rohrabacher if some of the recently instituted operational procedures regarding 757s may have “averted these two tragedies,” Hinson paused and said, “Yes, perhaps.”
During the five-hour hearing, subcommittee members also expressed concerns about why aviation officials in Canada and the United Kingdom took action on the 757 turbulence issue before the FAA did; whether the FAA can balance its two missions of ensuring safety and promoting the airline industry, and when the agency will hire a new chief scientist to replace Machol.
Thursday’s actions by the FAA come two months after the agency in May adopted a policy requiring smaller planes in most instances to stay four miles behind 757s during landings to avoid their potentially deadly wake turbulence.
Although there is not a consensus on the level of danger, the 757’s “clean” wing and body design appear to make it capable of producing higher-intensity levels of wake turbulence, funnels of air emanating from each wingtip containing hurricane-force winds.
For years, the FAA has resisted increasing the separation distance for planes landing behind 757s because it could cut the number of flights at the nation’s busiest airports. That could result in delays and revenue losses for the aviation industry.
