Critical Lapses In Federal Aviation Administration S Safety Oversight Of Airlines Abuses Of Regulatory Partnership Programs

Hearing to review the results of an oversight investigation. Two FAA Aviation Safety Inspectors have provided evidence raising serious questions of conduct violating the Fed. Aviation Reg¿s. (FARs) in the inspection and maint. program of Southwest Airlines (SWA). FAA employees have engaged in conduct, ¿which constitutes a violation of Fed. law, rule or reg¿n., gross mismgt., an abuse of authority and a substantial damage to public safety.¿ The Maint. Inspector for SWA knowingly allowed the airline to operate in March 2007 (and possibly beyond), and well after the inspection deadlines on a mandatory FAA Airworthiness Directive. There may be a pattern of regulatory abuse and that these regulatory lapses may be more widespread. Illustrations.

An unflinching look at the unique challenges posed by complex technologies we cannot afford to let fail—and why the remarkable achievements of civil aviation can help us understand those challenges. Nuclear reactors, deep-sea drilling platforms, deterrence infrastructures—these are all complex and formidable technologies with the potential to fail catastrophically. In Rational Accidents, John Downer outlines a new perspective on technological failure, arguing that undetectable errors can lurk in even the most rigorous and “rational” assessments of these systems due to the inherent limits of engineering tests and models. Downer finds that it should be impossible, from an epistemological viewpoint, to achieve the near-perfect reliability that we require of our most safety-critical technologies. There is, however, one such technology that demonstrably appears to achieve these “impossible” reliabilities: jetliners. Downer looks closely at civil aviation and how it has reckoned with the problem of failure. He finds that the way we conceive of jetliner reliability hides the real practices by which it is achieved. And he shows us why those practices are much less transferrable across technological domains than we are led to believe. Fully understanding why jetliners don't crash, he concludes, should lead us to doubt the safety of other “ultra-reliable” technologies. A unique and sobering exploration of technological reliability from an STS perspective, Rational Accidents is essential reading for understanding why our most safety-critical technologies are even more dangerous than we believe.

The FAA uses the Air Transport. Oversight System (ATOS) to oversee 7 legacyÓ airlines & 9 other airlines. This report refers to airlines that are not in ATOS as non-legacy airlines. Two other processes are used to oversee 99 non-legacy passenger airlines (NLPA), which represent a fast-growing segment of the commercial aviation passenger industry & carried 200 million passengers. in 2004. These establish a set of inspection activities for NLPA, & use principles of system safety to identify additional risk-based inspections for those airlines. This report assesses the processes used by FAA to ensure the safety of NLPA. Reviewed the strengths of FAA's inspection oversight for NLPA & the issues that hinder its effectiveness. Charts & tables.

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