The FAA: Culture of Corruption

FAA inspectors say concerns ignored

The meat of the article

Both FAA whistleblowers -- Charalambe Boutris and Peters -- said the agency views the airlines as its 'customers' instead of companies to be regulated. They said the FAA's chief maintenance inspector at Southwest, Douglas T. Gawadzinski, knowingly allowed Southwest to keep planes flying that put passengers at risk, and that another inspector knew of the problem and did nothing.

And people are surprised by this?

Here's the nuts and bolts. The aviation lobbies are very powerful, and the general public never gets concerned until there are bodies on the ground. When the FAA starts to do something that airlines or ALPA or AOPA doesn't like, it's pretty trivial to get someone in Congress applying heat, jeopardizing bureaucratic careers. This in turn rolls downhill all the way to the bottom - whether that bottom is inspectors or controllers. This is very typical:

Federal Aviation Administration inspector Douglas Peters choked up Thursday at a House hearing and needed a few sips of water to tell lawmakers about how a former manager came into his office, commented on pictures of Peters' family being most important, and then said his job could be jeopardized by his actions.

If Congress wants to see who is really, bottom line responsible, they need only look in a mirror. Nor are any of the last five presidential administrations immune from blame. Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, and Bush Jr. all share the blame for this. It's just as easy to lobby political appointees in the executive branch, or high ranking careerists who would like the opportunity for what the Japanese call Amakudari (The word means literally "descent from heaven"). Carter deregulated the airlines without putting into place mechanisms to ensure that the FAA would keep pace and remain in its proper role. To date, none of his successors in either the executive or legislative branch has remedied that error. The FAA has imposed labor contracts upon the controllers union in large part because the controllers union wanted to negotiate keeping traffic levels at a level that can be humanly handled without probabilities of error increasing, where if a system component fails -and they fail more often than the FAA admits - the resulting workload can still be handled.

I'm not really interested in blame. Since I don't fly much anymore, what I'm really interested in is effectively using the tax money they get so we don't get what controllers call "Aluminum showers" from falling airplane wreckage. But whatever public good there may be at stake, it's long past time to look at the FAA and what it regulates, and align the incentives for the FAA more closely along what we can all agree is the public good. I wouldn't be surprised if you needed to fire every single FAA employee above the bottom level to make this happen.