FAA's many failings

DYCKMAN E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 14, 2001

TALLAHASSEE -- One of the strange things about America is how rarely anybody is ever made to take a fall when something goes horribly wrong. There are far too few apologies, far too many excuses. The worse the bumble, the less the blame.

Behold the Federal Aviation Administration. How many high-level departures have occurred since Sept. 11? One. Only one. And he was a new hire, relatively blameless for the disaster, who is said to have quit -- or been forced out -- after objecting to an order to assign sky marshals to planes carrying Cabinet members instead of to flights he thought were more vulnerable.

The airlines had spent millions on lobbyists and campaign contributions to keep regulation weak. How many airline executives are now resigning in disgrace? None.

No one could have seen it coming, they say. But was anyone even looking? Amid the immense hubbub since, there has been conspicuously no initiative for a blue-ribbon commission of inquiry. To identity and destroy the terrorists is not enough. It is also necessary to expose and purge those whose negligence aided them.

This is not recrimination, it is common sense. When there is no penalty for failure there can be no fear of it.

The FAA has feared of nothing but giving offense to the airline industry. This institutional bias was in part the fault of Congress, which made the FAA responsible for promoting as well as regulating civil aviation, an impossible conflict. The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency, is reknowned for its professionalism and integrity in accident investigation. But the FAA is notorious for putting off what the NTSB recommends.

And now we have paid a ghastly price for the FAA's foot-dragging on repeated airport security warnings from law enforcement agencies and the General Accounting Office. One major GAO study -- not the first -- alerted Congress in June 2000 to the worsening performance of airport screeners at detecting dangerous objects. The GAO said a lot of it had to do with rapid turnover, often more than 100 percent a year at large airports, among the mostly contract employees whose pay is so poor (and whose benefits are so nonexistent) as to make a job at the airport McDonald's a step up. The GAO said at the time that the FAA saw the problems, but was "behind schedule" in correcting them.

That report is on the Internet (www.gao.gov) along with the GAO's testimony to Congress after the Sept. 11 atrocities. To read these documents is to weep, and then to rage. Consider this excerpt from Sept. 20:

". . . Progress on one key effort -- the certification of screening companies -- is still not complete because the implementing regulation has not been issued. It is now nearly 2 1/2 years since FAA originally planned to implement the regulation." (Emphasis supplied.)

But, you say, so what? Didn't the FAA allow knives aboard aircraft? Yes -- incredibly -but proper airport screening might still have taken proper alarm at the box cutters. One might be an innocent coincidence, but not two or three or four aboard the same aircraft.

As I write, Congress is in a wrangle over whether airport screeners should be government employees or remain on the payrolls of private security firms. My bias is toward the first alternative, but I'm coming to believe that it's not nearly as important who employs them as how well they are paid, trained and supervised. In Europe, the GAO noted, some screeners work for the government and others for private contractors, but all get higher pay and better benefits. Their turnover is much lower, and in one comparison the screeners of an unidentified country detected twice as many contraband test objects as their U.S. counterparts. The Europeans are treated like professionals, and respond accordingly.

This highlights one fundamental difference between the United States and Europe; there, everyone has a presumptive right to a living wage and modern benefits. Here, good luck. But you don't have to look to Europe for evidence that the FAA could and should have done better even by U.S. standards.

I was talking with Patrick Cannan, director of corporate relations at the Wackenhut Corp., regarding an Associated Press report that his company had lost 47 of its 50 airport screening contracts to competitors who had bid less. He said Wackenhut preferred not to compromise its standards on salary and training. Even when it won, it said, it could not afford health or retirement benefits on what the airlines were willing to pay.

But at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he said, the standards for training and experience are so much higher than the FAA's that the guards his company employs at nuclear plants can command fringe benefits as well as better pay.

"The utilities are responsible for the security but the NRC writes . . . such high requirements that they couldn't go out to a low bidder," Cannan said. "It includes a more intensive background investigation and higher qualifications."

The Homer Simpson of pop culture is a carefree clod at a nuclear plant. If reality wrote the script, he'd work at the FAA.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright