Philly Road Warrior: Shining a light on aircraft upkeep

We cannot - and should not - stray very far this spring from the issue of aircraft maintenance, and whether airlines and your government are doing all they can to make sure flying is safe.

Two weeks ago, the news was all about a record $10.2 million fine levied by the Federal Aviation Administration against Southwest Airlines for failing to inspect some of its planes for fuselage cracks. Less widely reported was an FAA announcement last week that it was ordering a check of maintenance records at all U.S. airlines, a total of 118 carriers.

The FAA said it told its inspectors to determine by the end of this week that airlines had complied with 10 airworthiness directives, which are safety orders requiring airlines to correct some problem or defect in an aviation product. Southwest was found to have violated such a safety order. By June 30, inspectors are to complete an audit of 10 percent of the hundreds of safety orders that apply to each airline's fleet of planes.

One possible reason for the FAA's new enthusiasm for doing the job taxpayers pay it to do is the bright light focused on the issue by Congress, other federal officials, and consumer and labor groups, led by the Teamsters Union and the Business Travel Coalition of Radnor.

Rep. James L. Oberstar (D., Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, helped shed light on Southwest's lapses by gathering information from whistle-blowers who work for the FAA. He plans a hearing April 3 in Washington where a phalanx of whistle-blowers and other experts are scheduled to testify about implications for the whole industry, an event worthy of heavy media coverage.

Clearly, we don't know yet what lapses in maintenance practices there might be among the airlines. As we said in the column two weeks ago, the system is basically safe for passengers, with the chances of someone dying in a U.S. airline accident so small that the numbers are virtually meaningless.

But we're concerned by the revelations of the last few weeks, along with earlier research on the outsourcing of maintenance by airlines conducted by the Government Accountability Office, Consumer Reports magazine and the Business Travel Coalition. Among the little-known facts that research revealed is that about half of all maintenance of U.S. commercial aircraft is done not by FAA-certified mechanics at the airlines but by workers at almost 5,000 domestic and foreign contract repair stations.

Kevin P. Mitchell, chairman of the coalition, recalled that more than a year ago he began consulting with William McGee, who had spent nine months investigating overseas maintenance practices for an article he did for Consumer Reports. McGee found that foreign contractors were subject to far less oversight by the FAA than the airlines' own in-house maintenance shops. Neither mechanics nor their supervisors in foreign repair stations are required to hold FAA certificates.

Mitchell, who is a frequent speaker to groups of corporate travel managers and others in the travel business, said that each time he started talking about aircraft maintenance "you could hear a pin drop." Travel managers were hanging on his every word, he said, because they don't want to be responsible for recommending their companies use a particular airline, only to find out later it was operating unsafe airplanes.

Along with many others, Mitchell hopes that the spotlight on the FAA will lead to an overhaul of an agency with serious systemic problems. The FAA has seen its maintenance-inspector workforce depleted by the Bush administration's philosophical belief in less-government-is-better and has come to depend too heavily on unsupervised outside contractors, Mitchell contends.

"It's like having one state trooper," he said, "on the entire Pennsylvania Turnpike system."

As always, let us know what you think.