Last month's revelation that Southwest Airlines was continuing to fly uninspected planes is continuing to reverberate through Congress.
Attention has shifted from Southwest and other airlines to the agency responsible for overseeing airline safety the Federal Aviation Administration.
Now, Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, wants the FAA to "clean house from top to bottom," to make the agency more vigilant in carrying out its proper mission.
For starters, Oberstar wants to close the "revolving door" that he says results in FAA inspectors leaving government service to take cushy airline jobs. He says he'll draft legislation to require inspectors to wait a specified period before they can work in the industry they once regulated.
Outsourcing
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Southwest, which faces a potential $10 million fine over the inspection violations, has cancelled plans to outsource aircraft maintenance to a company in El Salvador.
"We've been trying for years to get the FAA to pay attention to how dangerous it is to outsource maintenance overseas," said Teamsters Union President Jim Hoffa, whose members perform maintenance work in the U.S. "Our mechanics keep telling us how they often have to re-do work that was done wrong by airlines' outside vendors."
"Airline mechanics have to meet much higher standards in America than they do overseas," Hoffa said. "Mechanics in foreign shops don't even have to be FAA-certificated."
Hoffa said that between 1997 and 2006, U.S. airlines increased their outsourced maintenance expenses from 37 percent to 64 percent," Hoffa said.
In advance of Oberstar's Capitol Hill hearings on the subject, FAA Acting Administrator Robert Sturgell said the agency would institute a two-year ban on former FAA inspectors going to work for airlines in important maintenance jobs.
FAA whistle blowers have increasingly complained that FAA inspectors failed to act on repeated warnings about Southwest's inspection lapses, allowing the airline to "voluntarily" report missed deadlines, thus avoiding penalties.
Southwest faces a possible $10.2 million fine after the FAA cited the discount carrier for failing to inspect some of their planes for structural cracks. Specifically, the FAA maintains that the airline continued to use planes after it missed a mandatory deadline to have them inspected.
The inspections were ordered to look for structural cracks in the fuselage of the Boeing 737 aircraft Southwest uses.
Southwest initially said the missed inspections were an oversight, and after discovering the error, quickly re-inspected all the aircraft for cracks. It says the inspections were mostly routine and redundant and that flight safety was never compromised.
The FAA-mandated inspections are designed to find tiny cracks in an aircraft's fuselage before they can get bigger and compromise the structural integrity of the plane. Since a modern jetliner may be used for 30 years or more, these inspections are supposed to find the kinds of problems than can occur as an aircraft ages.
See Airlines Outsourcing More Maintenance.
