Getting Aggressive on Safety

In inspecting America’s commercial aircraft and checking on their pilots, Federal Aviation Administration officials take more than 370,000 separate certification actions every year, producing a tower of paper documents. But if air travel is a signature of modern civilization, why in the world is a federal agency using data systems that seem more suited to a Dickensian shop?

Safety and industry officials complain that crucial data are hard to access and, increasingly, that records of safety and maintenance problems get lost in the shuffle. There is no excuse. Modern technology can present the data far more efficiently, improving the safety review process. However, it cannot correct what some critics see as the FAA’s most egregious fault: failure to act aggressively when confronted with a pattern of safety problems.

Take ValuJet Airlines. Officials do not yet know what caused one of the company’s DC-9s to plummet into a Florida swamp earlier this month, killing 110. But long before the accident, internal FAA reports show, federal officials were well aware of, and concerned about, a string of problems plaguing the carrier’s aging fleet. Inspections were stepped up, but the agency concluded: “No significant trends in regulations violated have been noted.”

In recent years, Times reporters have documented a frightening array of airliner safety concerns--wing icing, wake turbulence and most recently a string of breakdowns in the 1950s-era radar system that airline pilots depend on for navigation. Passengers on some airliners clearly were at risk.

Against this background comes the so-called safety performance analysis system, or SPAS. SPAS, currently being developed for the FAA by the Sandia National Laboratory, will let airline safety inspectors feed maintenance records into one digital database. This will give federal officials, most prominently the FAA safety czar, access to coherent, easy-to-retrieve information. Importantly, the system could give the FAA better information sooner about troublesome patterns within particular carriers or among particular aircraft. It also could help the agency use its 2,500 safety inspectors more effectively. The system, say officials, should be operational by next year. It’s late in coming, but it will provide efficiency in assembling data. FAA officials themselves will have to turn up the speed with which they react.