The uncontained engine failure of Southwest flight 1380 reminds us once again that commercial aviation is a business that does not always put safety first – and regulators seem reluctant to change that. Jennifer Riordan’s death could have been avoided if only the FAA did not have a “Tombstone Mentality.” My guest on this special edition of Miles To Go: former FAA inspector general and aviation attorney Mary Schiavo.
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TRANSCRIPT
Miles O’Brien:
Hello and welcome to another edition of Miles to Go. I’m Miles O’Brien.
For those of you who have become loyal listeners, and we hope you’re out there somewhere, this episode will be a bit of a departure. You know I’ve been talking a lot about the rise of misinformation on the Internet as part of our big upcoming series on the PBS NewsHour. There will be more of that to come. And you can find out more about the series and when it airs on our website, milesobrien.com.
While you’re there, please sign up for our newsletter. It’s only once a week we won’t clutter your inbox with a bunch of stuff but it will nourish your mind. Well we hope. We’d like to get some hard data on that so feel free to rate and review our work in the appropriate places.
Sometimes news events can force us to rethink our plans. So while we’re still working on misinformation, this week offered a case in point on why we should rethink the subject matter sometimes.
I’m talking about the uncontained engine failure, explosive decompression, and emergency landing of Southwest Airlines flight 1380 in Philadelphia. One passenger was killed. It was the first fatality aboard a U.S. airliner in nearly a decade. That’s an amazing record. Sadly there’s a lot of reason to believe this could have been avoided had the FAA and the airlines done the right thing.
To delve into this a little more, I’m turning to one of my favorite aviation watchdogs, Mary Schiavo. She is a former inspector general of the Department of Transportation. That was in the 90s. And I think we can objectively call her tenure stormy.
After she left the government in 1997, she published a book called Flying Blind, Flying Safe, which laid out systemic failures in the way aviation is regulated in this country. And I’m here to tell you it is as relevant today as it was 21 years ago. And that’s the point of our conversation.
Now after we talked the FAA announced, in the next couple of weeks, it will order airlines to inspect with ultrasound any of the engines in their fleet of the same make and model and that have a certain number of cycles or takeoffs and landings. That sounds like good news but it doesn’t really date our conversation.
Mary and I were talking about the gaps in our aviation safety net.
Miles O’Brien:
Mary, thanks first of all for doing this.
Mary Schiavo:
Thank you. It’s good to be with you.
Miles O’Brien:
All right good. There’s been a lot of semantic discussion about what happened to that engine. Some people on the Internet have quibbled with me as to whether this was technically an uncontained engine failure, and that is actually a specific thing. It has to fail in the radial axis as I understand it. As best we can tell, was this an uncontained failure?
Mary Schiavo:
As best we can tell, I certainly think that it is. Now the government, probably 20 or 30 years ago, did a study of exactly how parts would exit the engine and the angles and the trajectories and all that. But in layman’s terms when parts of the engine exit the engine, aren’t contained in the engine, it’s an uncontained engine.
Miles O’Brien:
Yeah. So it really becomes one of these semantic discussions, which mean a lot to the technical people and the regulators and possibly the lawyers down the road. But if you’re a passenger in the back of that aircraft it is a difference without a distinction I guess.
Mary Schiavo:
I would agree with you completely.
Miles O’Brien:
So what we’re talking about here is a spinning turbo fan, that’s the part of the jet engine you see at the front. It spins very fast, obviously, and it has a series of titanium blades in it. And these obviously undergo tremendous stresses. As engineers certify they have to demonstrate that, first of all it’s unlikely for this to happen, but if it should happen that the pieces, what ultimately become very high speed shrapnel, will stay inside. Right? I mean there’s quite a process for this. Walk us through a little bit of that.
Mary Schiavo:
Right, well when they build an engine, a lot of people think that the cowling serves that purpose. No, the cowlings pretty much a marquee. To make the plane and the engine look pretty, and so Southwest could write its name on the side of the engine.
The containment apparatus is actually part of the engine. There are various liners. For example, the most important one is the combustion liner because you wouldn’t want the combustion to escape. But the engine itself is designed to contain as much as possible, these pieces of shrapnel, should something happen. But what we’ve seen in recent near tragedies, and of course this tragedy, is other parts of the engine also come off and it’s a cascading effect.
In this one as in other ones, the cowling itself came off and then the front part of the engine came off. And so it’s very difficult to contain it when you start having these multiple events of things escaping from the engines.
So while it’s designed not to have parts escaping, they do and they have, and there’s probably been… Well there’s many of these a year, as you know, and in the last decade there have probably been 15 or 20 pretty prominent ones where, no one has died, but they do happen several times a year.
Miles O’Brien:
Yeah I mean you would call this I guess, when you consider the millions of hours flown by the global fleet, it’s still a relatively rare occurrence.
Mary Schiavo:
It is, although I actually…members of my family have had it happen to them and I’ve had it happen to me.
I think what most people think of is this is an event that usually happens on take off, climb and climb to cruise, and that’s true. I think about 77 percent of the incidents happen on takeoff, and a lot of times they can get that stopped before they hit V1. And certainly before Vr, the rotation speed, so a lot of times we see this is an event that happens on the ground or at takeoff.
But I looked at the numbers. 14 percent of the uncontained engine failures actually happened at cruise. As it did on this one and as it did on the prior Southwest Airlines one in 2016. I think generally what people think is you lose an engine on takeoff and that’s where it gets confined, but not always.
Miles O’Brien:
That is an important point for people, and this is the failure that they drill so frequently when pilots go for their recurrent training. It’s you know the classic V1 engine fire, which is just down the runway. You have to make the decision whether to lift off or not. And you you’ve lost an engine, it’s on fire, and that’s that’s a very dynamic event.
The reason they train for that one so much, I think, is that the that’s when the engine endures its greatest amount of stress. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that. You’re going from zero to very fast, nearly full throttle. Not quite but at the maximum thrust. And that’s when problems would be laid bare. That’s why they train for this.
But it is unusual a cruise. And yet what do you think that tells you? Is there anything we can surmise from that?
Mary Schiavo:
Yes, and that both Southwest accidents happened at cruise. And that we had the warning from from CFM, the manufacturer, that it was a fatigue situation. That maybe the manufacturer got it right when they put out their service bulletin back in June 2017. That it has to do with the number of cycles on the engine, and that it is a metal fatigue situation. Which would mean over time the fatigue in the crack is going to increase, and it has more to do with the number of times that the engines have started and run than the volume of thruster, the work that the engine is being put through on takeoff.
Sometimes, maybe these bulletins, they get it right first time out of the box. Now that will remain to be seen, but I think it has to do with a number of hours and the number of cycles on the engine and then it was a fatigue point right from the start on these engines. Which given that service bulletin, I keep going back to that, but they were very specific on which blades to go inspect. They were specific in that it was after 15,000 cycles and they also were very specific in saying: “Please airlines” — these are layman’s terms — “would you please get these inspections done by September?”
So this was June, and they wanted all the airlines to inspect this by September, so clearly the manufacturer thought that this was a pretty serious thing. And, of course, those inspections did not happen.
Miles O’Brien:
All right. Help people out on what a service bulletin is and what it means versus something like an airworthiness directive. There’s a distinction here which is important for people.
Mary Schiavo:
You’re exactly right. Well a service bulletin can be put out by the manufacturer of an engine, by the manufacturer of a part, by Boeing. And what it is, is basically a heads up. It’s a warning that says, “We have found this issue and you need to go out there and look at the equipment that you’re flying: the engines, the planes, the landing gear, your collision avoidance equipment. You need to go out and look because we have identified a problem and we want you to go inspect.”
The problem with the service bulletin is it is a request. It does not have the full force and effect of a U.S. regulation. An airworthiness directive does. An airworthiness directive is something that’s put out by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Manufacturers, airlines and the FAA itself, they get asked that these things be put out. But the way we get them is they’re first published in the Federal Register, the government publication that publishes all intended regulations. Be it a regulation on air quality, be it a regulation on the conduct of the justice system, or in this case what you need to do to keep the flying public safe.
And so they publish their proposed airworthiness directive, and it’s called a notice of proposed rulemaking. And then airlines and the public…anyone can comment. And then at the end of the comment period, the FAA decides either to make it a regulation, an airworthiness directive is a regulation. Or change it or republish publish it or do nothing.
In this case, they did not make it an actual airworthiness directive. It did not have the full force and effect of a government regulation, so nothing happened.
Miles O’Brien:
We have gotten a little ahead of ourselves but I wanted to make sure we got the lexicon squared away here. Let’s go back to August of 2016 and the previous incident, which has some haunting parallels to what we saw in Philadelphia yesterday.
Tell us what happened in that event and what happened, or perhaps more relevant in this case, what didn’t happen after that event.
Mary Schiavo:
When the event happened yesterday, I went — you know, I just love the internet — so I went and grabbed a picture of what that engine looked like from 2016, and I put it side-by-side with yesterday’s accident.
So what happened in 2016 was an uncontained engine failure during a flight, it was at cruise level. And the NTSB, of course, when it landed it landed safely — Nobody got hurt, nobody got killed — And the NTSB started its investigation. A few weeks after that happened, in September, the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board, put out its preliminary report. Which is just a couple pages, as you know. The public might not know that.
The first thing the NTSB puts out is this little preliminary summary. And right in that summary the NTSB said, “Look, we have identified metal fatigue. We have identified fatigue in some of these turbine blades. At least one of these turbine blades had exited the plane. And we think this is a metal fatigue problem on the turbine blades”. Which was actually more information than you get out of some NTSB preliminary reports, but they put that out. That was back in September 2017 when that preliminary came out.
Miles O’Brien:
Okay. That sounds like the kind of conclusion that would get a lot of people’s attention.
Here you have a workhorse engine. This is the CFM56-7. This is built in a partnership between General Electric and the United States and Safran, the French jet engine maker. Total workhorse, and thousands of them out there. They power the 737s. Great reliability, all these things, and and truly a lot of passengers are relying on those particular turbo fans spinning and spinning intact.
So when a finding like that comes out, even preliminarily, and we should say the NTSB report is still not finished. I had a brief exchange with the NTSB chairman, Robert Sumwalt, about that and he said, “I’ve been trying to work on this problem.” I think the NTSB is way too much on its plate. You might agree with me on that one.
Mary Schiavo:
I do.
Miles O’Brien:
The fact that there’s no final report on that is not good. But even that preliminary indication, you would think maybe the FAA would take notice and do something that would short circuit that long rulemaking process. What happened then?
Mary Schiavo:
Well what happened next, and to me this is…operators of this engine had every opportunity to do something because clearly people did notice. And in particular the engine manufacturer noticed because they put out what to me is a pretty comprehensive service bulletin, which we talked about before. This is a recommendation that operators of that plane do something, and they put that out in June 13, 2017. CFM put out a pretty extensive service bulletin.
It identified numbers of particular fan turbine blades that they suspected might have the problem. It specified exactly how these blades should be taken out of the engine and tested ultrasonically. It set forth in many dozens of pages exactly how this should be done, how you should identify cracks, what should happen if you found one. How long it should take you to do this, and that you can return the blades back to the engine, back to service, if you don’t see on the ultrasonic testing any of these cracks. So that was pretty specific instruction and they added one more thing, which I thought was pretty good.
The engine manufacturers said, “And by the way, operators of this engine” — any engines affected thereby — “Over 15000 cycles since the last full inspection, you should have this inspection done by September 24th 2017.” So they put it out in June. They felt strongly enough about it that they wanted this to be done by September. They told carriers, “Hey you’ve got to do this, and you only have a few months you should have this done.” Sounds like a good plan. Sounds like something that somebody should do. A warning from the engine manufacturer with real specifics.
But here’s where it got muddied: Before this deadline passed, and there was no indication that everyone was pulling these off and doing the ultrasonic testing because again a service bulletin is not a regulation. That’s an airworthiness directive.
Miles O’Brien:
Just to be clear, this is this is the engine maker trying to do the right thing here saying, “Hey airlines we see a problem. The regulators haven’t quite figured out what to do. But the prudent course of action is to do this.”
And you would think the airlines would say, “Oh, maybe we should get busy.” All right go ahead.
Mary Schiavo:
You’re right about that. But we’ve seen this, I mean, you and I’ve seen this so many times that perhaps we just get used to the way it works. We see these service bulletins going out. And so many times in the aftermath of accidents, we see where there’s outstanding service bulletins that haven’t been acted on yet.
You and I have seen accidents where there’s outstanding airworthiness directives that haven’t been acted on yet, and carriers tend to wait towards the end of the deadline to do those. So what happens next —
Miles O’Brien:
We’ve just gotta say it here. You know, safety is important but ultimately this is a business.
Mary Schiavo:
That’s right.
Miles O’Brien:
And if you want to understand it…So one of my flight instructors quizzed me once early on. He said, “So what is it that keeps an airplane in the air?” And I started talking about Bernoulli and all these things he said, “No, no. What keeps an airplane in the air is money.” And money is the thing you need to follow if you want to try to understand how aviation really works, right?
Mary Schiavo:
Well I’d actually put a different word in there. I’ve thought about this so many times, and we’ve had discussions in green rooms and stuff. “Why don’t more planes fall out of the sky?” And I think it is one word. Because they did. They do. From time to time they do.
I think what keeps an airplane in the air is redundancy. Engineers, and let’s give the manufacturer credit and let’s give the government some credit. They have required so many redundancies and backups that flying does not rely on one thing. And when we see a tragedy happen, I say this many times, it’s that several things have gone wrong to wipe out the redundancy. So I like the word ‘redundancy’ because that’s what I think helps to keep us safe.
Miles O’Brien:
So money and redundancy, and if you have redundancy in your money you’re doing well.
Mary Schiavo:
Well that’s right. I’ll agree with you on that. And let’s face it, redundancy costs money so you might be right. It might be money.
Miles O’Brien:
In any case I think we’re both saying the same thing from a different perspective.
Let’s get back to our narrative here. So the airlines actually kind of resisted this, didn’t they?
Mary Schiavo:
Yes. They didn’t to do these inspections after the engine manufacturer put out the service bulletin, and then the FAA got involved. The FAA put in the Federal Register, this government publication that that you have to put proposed regs and laws in. In August 25, 2017, the Federal Government published this notice of proposed rulemaking. They were going to make it potentially an airways directive saying “Operators of this engine, you have to go out there and do these inspections.” So that was August. And then of course the manufacturers said the inspections should already be done by September 24th.
And then October 10th rolls around. October 10, 2017, which is the deadline to comment on the airworthiness directive proposal. And this is after the manufacturers said they should already have done these inspections. Southwest Airlines objects. They filed their objection, and they were not alone. American Airlines objected. Delta was pretty clever. Delta did technical commentary. I wouldn’t call there’s an objection. They were pretty smart how they did it, but Southwest Airlines objected to the airworthiness directive and they said, “Look, we’re going to need 18 months to do these inspections.”
So add that on top of… Remember the deadline from the manufacturer already passed and then they wanted an additional 18 months. Southwest said it looked like they had at least 109 engines that would be affected. American Airlines by the way had many more. They had 728 potential and 220 for sure, they thought.
Southwest Airlines said something to me which was kind of shocking. Now you know this, but the public may not. When you have an airplane in commercial passenger service, some parts are critical parts. Meaning you can’t fly without these parts, and they have to be certified parts. They have to be the genuine thing. The real McCoy. They cannot be what the FAA has come to call “suspected unapproved parts”. They can’t. They aren’t interchangeable. You can’t say, “I don’t like this part so I’m going to go down to the hardware store and get something else.”
Southwest said in reply, in this letter they filed with the government on October 17th, that they could not track these turbine blades by numbers that the manufacturer had given them way back in June to go inspect. That they intermixed them. That if they inspected something they put it back into service and they could no longer track the individual turbine blades. And that they had been widely dispersed through their fleet. And frankly, they said, “While it might look like we have 109 engines affected, we might have 732 engines affected.” So they could no longer track these turbine blades individually by the manufacturer number. That’s not insignificant.
Miles O’Brien:
Well that’s a little surprising to me because if you spent any time in a maintenance and repair facility for an airline, everything is tagged and the progeny of that part is very specific. It’s not willy nilly. It’s not like, “We’re going to put this turbo fan over here, and put that over here. And oh gosh! I left that one over on my tool chest.” It doesn’t work that way.
Mary Schiavo:
Exactly, and that’s why I don’t personally believe that statement, but I have no evidence so I cannot begin to sit here and say that Southwest was not telling the truth to the government. Because I have no evidence. It’s just that my gut tells me, “No, you have to track these parts. You have to know where they are because if you have to replace them, you have to use an approved part to do it with.
There has been so much trouble over the years on turbine blades, including a criminal case back in the 90s where a company out of New York was repairing them. They were welding new edges on them because, as you know, the edge is like an airfoil and has to be knife sharp in some cases. And they have cooling chambers in the turbine blades. It’s not just a hunk of titanium. It’s a very, very, very specialized part. Wonderful really, when you think about it. All the things that a blade does.
But it also has chambers inside. And so when they say, “Nah, we can’t track them. We don’t know exactly where they are all at”…I doubt that. My gut tells me, “No, that can’t be.” But I don’t have any evidence to call Southwest’s submission to the government faults. I do not.
Miles O’Brien:
Let’s just say it doesn’t pass our smell test here. We’ll leave it at that.
Mary Schiavo:
Yeah.
Miles O’Brien:
All right. So we’re still talking about an event that happened in August of 2016. And we’ve got the manufacturer getting on board in June. We’ve got a September deadline for them. We’ve got an October deadline. But this is all way downstream of this event. And what you see is the NTSB still working, the report still outstanding, the FAA kind of slow walking an airworthiness directive. Going through the process, I don’t see any urgency here in something to me that is a type of event that should really capture people’s attention. An engine like this spitting out a blade in cruise should have been you know a higher defcon, if you will. Would you agree?
Mary Schiavo:
I would agree because in the 2016 incident, shrapnel did hit the plane. It just didn’t hit the window.
Miles O’Brien:
Yeah. And that’s a key point. So the bullet, the shrapnel was dodged, whatever you want to say there. And you know the term you and I use this all the time is the FAA has what is called a “Tombstone Mentality”. Meaning, until people die , they really don’t pay attention. Sad to say, but if you look at the evidence over the years, there’s no other way to say. It is true isn’t it?
Mary Schiavo:
Well it is true. They always say, “Well, nobody died.” They actually say this all the time. Unless somebody dies they say, “Well, safety wasn’t compromised.” Well of course it was compromised. And what’s stunning to me is that the manufacturer, CFM, the FAA…they got ahead of the NTSB. They actually acted before the NTSB ever issued its final report. That’s kind of amazing because usually what they do is they respond to NTSB recommendations.
Here, we have three groups sort of coming at this from different parts of the elephant when someone needs to say, “Hey, just because you don’t have your ports done, NTSB, just because you didn’t get your airworthiness directive issued, FAA…That doesn’t mean that the airline doesn’t have the duty, and the responsibility and the job to go out there and do these inspections.” There is no reason, there is nothing in the law, that makes an airline wait on the government. Nothing.
Miles O’Brien:
And they frequently will tell you, when you ask them about safety, that we far exceed FAA regulations. Right? And they tell you that with a straight face.
But this is just absolute case in point of just the opposite. You actually have the manufacturer, the entity from which they buy these engines, who they have a longstanding relationship with saying, “You really should check this out.” And they are ignoring it. So shame on the airlines. But also why are regulators falling down on the job here? Is there something that is new and different here, or is this just a continuum of a long sad story that goes back to your experience really going back to the ValuJet crash days, when you first wrote that book that truly called attention to a lot of these shortcomings?
Mary Schiavo:
I think people saying “Oh my! This is an aberration. They’ve fallen down here.” No, this is how it usually works. This is how it goes. There are literally hundreds now. The NTSB didn’t get their recommendations out in this case, but there are hundreds of NTSB regulations languishing at the FAA.
The FAA on the Colgan crash, you’ll remember…It was the second Colgan crash. People forget about the first one — the Colgan crash was.
Miles O’Brien:
Yeah, this is February 2009. The crash, on approach to Buffalo…This was the last U.S. airline fatality incident that we were referring to back in 2009. Everybody died onboard, and this was a classic case of a poorly-trained crew that was exhausted. All right go ahead.
Mary Schiavo:
Those recommendations and those issues and those studies concerning pilot rest and crew rest requirements, those went back decades that they had been thinking about changing them. The Civil Aeromedical Institute in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma had looked at crew rest in the 80s. And so to say that the FAA hadn’t acted in a year and a half, you know, nobody at the FAA gets excited over that. I mean these things can go on for years and years. And it’s truly stunning how long things can just languish at the FAA. Which is why I was surprised, to find action.
To me, this says this was very serious and they knew it. That both the engine manufacturer and the FAA attempted to act before the NTSB report came out. So to me that says, “Hey, people did realize this was serious.” And indeed it is. It could have caused the loss of an aircraft.
Miles O’Brien:
Okay, so now we go to Philadelphia. Already the NTSB has indicated to us that it was a metal fatigue issue, same root cause as in August of 2016. A fan blade, same part. Lots of similarity there. And while this investigation obviously takes a long time, seeing as the NTSB hasn’t closed the last one, can we really afford to wait another 20 plus months to have some sort of regulatory weigh in on all of this? It seems like, now, the urgency level must go higher.
Mary Schiavo:
Well absolutely it must go higher, and I think finally Southwest Airlines realized that because yesterday they said they were going to have these inspections done in 30 days. A year ago they said it’d take 18 months, and now they say they’re going to do them in 30 days.
However, this causes me alarm. Because CFM’s service bulletin says, “You have to take these out. You can’t just stand and look at the engine, you actually have to do ultrasonic testing and to do that you’ve got to take them out of the engine.” I would imagine that they’re really going to do it the way it needs to be done. I would assume they’re going to do with no disruption of service to their routes, and their passengers and their scheduled service already. Which then brings me to my final thought which is, if you can do it in 30 days, you can do without disrupting your schedule and your flights and you can do what they really said, ultrasonic testing…I would think they wouldn’t chance not doing it the right way if they could have done it all along.
Miles O’Brien:
You could, I suppose, make an argument that this is of such urgency that this needs to be done right away. And the event I’m thinking about, it was back in 2008 when the FAA grounded all the American Airlines MD-80 fleet, when there was some concern about the wiring in the landing gear portion of the aircraft. I might be missing a few details but that was so urgent that they grounded all the American Airlines planes in order to demonstrate that they had been inspected before they would fly. What’s different this time?
Mary Schiavo:
Well I don’t think anything’s different and if anything this is just as serious and this is just as shocking that so many entities, certainly the FAA, the, manufacturer, the airlines, have known about this. And here, since we have a pretty limited universe, at least according to the manufacturer. They know what fan blades are in question. They know Southwest has already identified potentially 109 engines.
The difference is Southwest says they can’t track the blades, and that’s not the flying public’s problem. I would have no problem if I worked for the FAA saying, “Okay, well those 109 engines are grounded until you do the inspection if that’s where the fan blades are.” If you don’t know where the fan blades are, that’s your problem Southwest. That’s a very disturbing development since they’re flight critical parts.”
Miles O’Brien:
Should we, as citizens of this country, as members of the flying public, demand the FAA do more here?
Mary Schiavo:
Oh absolutely. But, the FAA doesn’t really pay attention to a lot of citizen demands. I think what people are doing, and certainly what I’m going to do, is vote with your pocketbook and with your feet.
I mean until these inspections are done, the public has no way to determine where these engines are, where these blades are. Only the airline can do that. And since you don’t know if that plane that pulls up to your gate is one of these planes with the 15,000 cycles and the suspect blades, I think people will stay off until they have an all clear that all these inspections have been done. They’re going to vote with their pocketbooks and vote with their feet.
Miles O’Brien:
In the meantime though, we can make those decisions individually, but the fact of the matter is there are a lot of 737s in the air even as we speak which could very well have these cracks and we just don’t know it.
Mary Schiavo:
That’s absolutely right. And on more airlines than Southwest. This is the workhorse of the fleet, and when the manufacturer put out this warning this affected many airlines. Absolutely. And the same thing could happen again tomorrow. It is very disturbing that the FAA and the airlines are just continuing to fly. These are urgent inspections. and I’m alarmed. I’m concerned.
Miles O’Brien:
So what has changed since 2008, when the FAA grounded those American Airlines MD-80s, to today?
Mary Schiavo:
Well nothing, except the clout of the airlines is greater than ever. I think the FAA has some real problems. On September 11, 2001, a lot of us in the industry knew that they weren’t policing security, and I think they were stunned by the fact that they were busted up. That the security job was taken away from them and a new agency was created. Since then there’s kind of been a slide. I think they they had a chance then to refocus on safety. “We are going to be the safety agency.”
But they still haven’t. They still think they have to promote and help the airlines bottom lines even though the airlines are making record profits in history. Never in history have they been making this much profit. Granted, it’s on bag fees and change fees. But I think they just are not the strong force for safety that they need to be and they do not like to be the cop. Never has the FAA liked to get tough on enforcement. So I actually think that the 2008 action was an aberration.
Miles O’Brien:
I guess it’s worth reminding people of a little bit of history. That the predecessor agency of the FAA, its original intent, its original charter, was to promote and regulate the aviation industry. A fundamental conflict of interest from day one. And while that has officially been changed, and that is no longer the official motto, that philosophy is still there isn’t it?
Mary Schiavo:
Absolutely, and it hasn’t really officially been changed. That was a sleight of hand. After the ValuJet tragedy, when this was all brought to the forefront of their dual mission, they put out a statement for the public that says: “Our mission won’t be to promote the airlines any more. We’re going to change it to encourage.”
But there was actually a memo within the FAA that said: “We don’t intend to change anything about the way we do business.” We’re going to do this for public consumption. We’re going to change promote to encourage, and by the way rank and file FAAers, go about your business just as always. So I really don’t think that they intended any change whatsoever.
But this is a really disturbing one because of how much information everyone had including the FAA.
Miles O’Brien:
So if you were running the FAA right now, and I believe the job is available at the moment, it’s open. If you were running the FAA, what would you do?
Mary Schiavo:
I would do an emergency airworthiness directive, which is why I will never be running the FAA. Because you have to get through Senate confirmation, and every airline in America has some very attentive senators and members of Congress that watch out for their bottom line.
But I think this clearly calls for an emergency airworthiness directive, because it really was fortunate. I mean you had a great flight crew. You had luck on your side that you didn’t lose the plane. It was just a lucky break that the plane wasn’t lost so I think it definitely calls for an emergency airworthiness directive.
The fact that the airlines, some airlines now — and I’m taking this only from comments to the rulemaking back in 2017 — the fact that they claim they can’t track these fan blades. That’s iffy. But that’s not a public safety problem. It’s their problem, so I think it’s an emergency airworthiness directive is in order.
Miles O’Brien:
I totally agree, and FAA, NTSB, airlines…do the right thing here. Do the right thing. You can afford it, right?
Mary Schiavo:
I agree. They can right now.
Miles O’Brien:
And let’s not forget that there’s a family in Albuquerque, New Mexico grieving the loss of one woman who…It didn’t have to happen.
Mary Schiavo:
Absolutely. It didn’t have to happen and condolences to her family, it’s just heartbreaking.
Miles O’Brien:
Absolutely. Mary Schiavo always a pleasure.
And a couple of things I wanted to mention. First of all if you’re interested in all this, it’s worth reading your book. Do you want to share a few details about it? It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but it’s still out there right?
Mary Schiavo:
Well it’s still out there on I think secondhand books. It’s not being published. Hasn’t been published for a long time. But it’s called Flying Blind, Flying Safe. And there’s a funny story if you’ve got one more minute. It’s a funny story how that book came to be.
I mean we had so many battles in the years that I was inspector general, and it was always fighting. The FAA would not step up to the plate to do what needed to be done. The Coast Guard always did. Highways tried. Pipelines tried. These were all things that I had under my oversight review at DOT.
And so when I got tough, we were getting tough with the FAA my whole tenure, but we warned them about ValuJet before the crash. And I actually sent a team down to look at ValuJet. We were investigating them. But when it went down, I said, “Look, we knew this.” I mean I just went public with what had happened, that we that they were under investigation. The wrath of the entire Senate came down on my head. Senator Stevens called on President Clinton to fire me. They scrubbed my expense records. They scrubbed my maternity leave. They scrubbed everything they could trying to get some dirt.
I always followed the government rules because I had been a federal employee for teen years and the rules make sense if you follow them. And finally, Senator Stevens called upon my office to produce for him every single report letter. Everything I had done during my tenure. Well guess what? There’s also another federal regulation. I know federal regulations, and I love federal regulations and I taught federal administrative law so I know it.
Miles O’Brien:
God bless you by the way. God bless you for doing that.
Mary Schiavo:
“The employee is entitled to a copy!” So I requested a copy, walked out of the Department of Transportation free and clear with every single document I needed to write the book. Then wrote the book and that was it. That’s how the book came out, and the book is about the trials and tribulations with trying to make the FAA regulate.
Miles O’Brien:
Well, unfortunately the themes are still very relevant today. Which is to say, unfortunately things haven’t changed very much.
There’s one other thing I am going to shamelessly plug, a piece I did for Frontline in 2009, in the wake of the Colgan Air crash in Buffalo. It’s called Flying Cheap. We looked into a lot of the issues we’ve been just talking about over the past half hour, and it’s available at the PBS Frontline website. Check it out if you’re interested in this subject.
Mary, thanks as always. A great pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for listening to Miles to Go. A special edition this week.
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We would love for you to share your thoughts with us and stay abreast of what we’re doing. Thanks again for joining us on Miles to Go. We’ll see you next time.
