FAA Reorganizing, Adding Safety Office : Aviation: Agency responds to criticism for failure to act in advance of two crashes--one in O.C.--regarding potential danger from Boeing 757 wake turbulence.
Four months after an internal report criticized the Federal Aviation Administration’s ability to act upon safety issues, the agency is being reorganized along business lines, with the addition of a new safety systems office, FAA Administrator David R. Hinson said Wednesday.
While insisting that all FAA personnel consider safety their main task, Hinson said he is establishing a new safety systems division reporting directly to him.
The aviation safety goal is “zero defects,” he said, adding that he expects the new office to help attain this. The office will cooperate with other nations, airlines, manufacturers and others to collect all types of information about aviation and aircraft operations, he said.
The reorganization comes four months after a joint investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the FAA concluded that the FAA did not have the proper procedures in place to ensure that safety concerns are acted upon in a timely fashion.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena and Hinson ordered the internal review in mid-June after a series of reports in The Times indicated that the FAA knew about the potential danger of Boeing 757 wake turbulence long before two crashes that claimed 13 lives. In one of these, the top two executives of the In-N-Out Burgers chain and three others were killed in December, 1993, in Santa Ana.
In a 46-page report released after the internal probe, a review panel recommended that Hinson create a more effective mechanism to address safety issues.
The report said the agency lacked “a single organization, mechanism or entity” that can identify potential safety problems, alert others within the agency and follow up on safety recommendations.
Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Technology, Environment and Aviation on July 28, Hinson pledged that within 60 days he would devise a better system to spot and act upon emerging safety problems.
The goal is to study every bit of available data, analyze it in new ways and set up an early-warning system for any problems, Hinson explained.
For example, he said, large amounts of data are generated during routine service and maintenance work, pilot reports, minor flight problems and other instances that may not attract attention.
By compiling these data in computers, analysts could locate patterns or note what seem to be minor problems for repair before an incident occurs, Hinson said.
Although it was not a universally held view, the Department of Transportation-FAA report revealed that some officials within the FAA believed the agency could have acted sooner than it did in taking steps designed to prevent accidents caused by Boeing 757 wake turbulence.
