Claims of Pressure on FAA Inspectors to Be Investigated

The Transportation Department’s inspector general announced Tuesday she will investigate suggestions that inspectors for the Federal Aviation Administration have been pressured to go easy on ValuJet despite previous concerns about the airline’s safety record.

The inspector general, Mary Fackler Schiavo, said “a number of claims have come up . . . that inspectors were pressured” to soften their reports on ValuJet’s performance. “Obviously, we will investigate that,” she said. “That is our responsibility.”

Schiavo’s announcement, made during a television appearance, came as debate over Saturday’s crash of a ValuJet DC-9 began focusing on whether the agency, whose job it is to police the airline industry, has been diligent enough in enforcing its safety regulations.

At a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) criticized the FAA, saying it has gone too far in cutting back the number of inspectors it sends out to the field.

Hollings noted that the plane used on the fatal Flight 592, which crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing 109 people, had logged three breakdowns over the last 18 months. He said that track record is “something that we can’t condone,” and he urged the FAA to “stop playing games.”

The developments came as the FAA announced a series of new measures to bolster its airline inspection program, including speeding up the hiring of 91 more inspectors to its safety staff of 2,600 and introducing a new system for gathering safety and performance data on airlines.

David Hinson, the FAA’s administrator, said the agency also would begin a broad-scale review of its inspection operations with an eye toward making them more effective. “We are addressing the matter of safety . . . as expeditiously as we can,” he told the committee.

But Hinson also insisted that the FAA still is doing its job and has been as tough on low-cost airlines such as ValuJet as it is on the major carriers, like American and Delta.

He dismissed skepticism about the FAA’s assurances that ValuJet is a safe airline. “When we say an airline is safe to fly, it is safe to fly,” he told members of the Commerce Committee. “There is no gray area.”

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It was not immediately clear how comprehensive Schiavo’s investigation would be. Although the inspector general did not elaborate, senior officials said the probe would focus initially on the FAA’s Atlanta office, which has responsibility for inspecting ValuJet planes.

Schiavo has been critical of the FAA’s overall enforcement practices, telling an audience on CNN’s “Crossfire” program late Monday that “I think they [the FAA] know they are in need of repair.”

Schiavo said she was alarmed by the recent congressional testimony of an FAA inspector and an airline employee who said FAA inspectors too often are ill-trained, poorly supervised and under pressure to overlook safety problems rather than report them.

Testifying before a Senate subcommittee two weeks ago, the pair--shielded behind a screen to conceal their identities--alleged that one airplane, which had been readily made available to inspectors, had been inspected 200 times, while others had escaped any scrutiny at all.

The FAA has come under fire repeatedly over the last decade--particularly after major plane crashes, for being too accommodating to the industry that it is supposed to regulate.

Over the years, critics have charged that the FAA has been slipshod in its inspection of airline equipment, too lax in enforcing its own rules and too late in ordering crucial changes that might have saved lives had they been in place before.

For its part, the FAA has cited its efforts as contributing to the nation’s ever-improving aviation safety record. Hinson on Tuesday noted that if the 1960 accident rate were in effect today, there would be a fatal incident every 10 days.

“I don’t want to hear anymore how safe we are due to statistics,” Hollings said Tuesday. “We need a strong FAA, we need a responsible FAA.”

Hollings’ criticism that the FAA may have gone too far in cutting its inspection force and narrowing the training for its inspectors was acknowledged by the agency’s associate administrator, Anthony J. Broderick, who conceded that the cuts had been “too deep.”

Schiavo’s position appeared to conflict with statements by President Clinton and Transportation Secretary Federico Pena that ValuJet is still a safe airline despite its previous maintenance problems and Saturday’s crash.

As the department’s inspector general, Schiavo enjoys an autonomy that permits her to pursue virtually any investigation that she chooses without fear of retribution, either by the White House or by the secretary’s office.

Last weekend, Schiavo made news by confessing in a Newsweek essay that she goes “out of my way to stay off commuter planes” because of concern over safety. She also said she would “not fly on marginal airlines” and has “avoided flying on ValuJet” because of its recent mishaps.

Asked Tuesday about the gap between Pena’s view and her own, Schiavo was unrepentant. “Well,” she said on CBS’ “This Morning” program, “the secretary and the FAA make the call on what’s a safe airline. . . . But my job is going beyond that. My job is to find problems.”

Nevertheless, Schiavo’s public criticisms have rankled at least one member of the Senate committee.

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While not actually calling for her dismissal, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) noted pointedly that Clinton has “the right to remove an inspector general for dereliction of duty” and suggested that Pena and Hinson “should examine into that.”

“It is not a function of the inspector general to go public and try to destroy confidence in our airline system,” he said.

An attorney and private pilot herself, Schiavo, 40, has been the department’s inspector general since October 1990. She was appointed by President Bush, whose campaign she headed in Missouri in the 1988 election.

She also has been a federal prosecutor, serving on the Justice Department’s organized crime and racketeering strike force in the mid-1980s and was a White House fellow in 1987 and 1988, attached as special assistant to the U.S. attorney general.