Budget Cuts Threaten Safety Programs

Fewer people and less money – after accounting for inflation – will be available in coming years to provide safety oversight of the aviation industry. The information emerging from recently released U.S. government budget documents shows that some high priority safety programs are being sharply cut back or are being zeroed out entirely.

The trends, contained in fiscal year 2005 budget request documents for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suggest that the agency faces a significant challenge in coming years, specifically: managing safety mandates while coping with increasing fixed costs in the face of a shrinking budget. The implication for the situation a few years from now is sobering, as that near-future will come at a time of great pressure to reduce federal spending to meet the Bush administration’s promise in this campaign season to halve the deficit within five years.

Thus, the fiscal 2005 budget request provides a glimpse of belt-tightening to come for an agency that declares in its budget sub-mission that safety is the top priority. The FAA’s $13.9 billion total budget request for fiscal 2005 increases only $99 million. This increase of seven-tenths of a percent is not sufficient to keep FAA funding apace with the rate of inflation. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) projects inflation in fiscal 2005 at 1.4 percent. In other words, the agency’s real purchasing power, as it were, decreases. While the FAA is asking for a $99 million increase, that 1.4- percent inflation rate means a decrease of some $195 million.

The agency estimates that $8.8 billion of its budget request is devoted to the support of its safety programs – or roughly 63 percent of every dollar. Of its 48,800 full time equivalent (FTE) personnel, the FAA asserts that 42,000 are devoted to safety programs, or nearly nine out of ten people in the agency.

However, between 2004 and 2005, the number of FTEs supporting safety programs is slated to decline slightly. While dollar increases are shown in some safety programs, they decrease in others. Seven program areas have been selected to illustrate the emerging oversight challenge facing the agency.

A bit of cognitive dissonance seems to be at work. In its budget documents, the Department of Transportation (DOT) said the FAA “will develop and implement airport design standards and surface movement procedures to mitigate the risk of runway incursions.” The FAA is part of DOT and its budget is a subset of the DOT request. Despite the action verbiage about the runway safety program, the money devoted to fielding incursion-prevention technology declines in 2005 and the number of FTEs in the FAA’s office of runway safety also decreases significantly.

Air traffic control (ATC) modernization projects are described in DOT budget documents as vital to “improve aviation safety and sustain capacity.” However, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) sees a $395 million (16 percent) cut in spending on ATC facilities and equipment.

“You cannot modernize the system and add capacity by announcing there will be vastly less money to pay for it,” declared NATCA President John Carr. The plan to triple capacity in the next 15-20 years amounts, he said, to an “empty election year promise that sounds good but doesn’t add up to anything more than fuzzy math.” The budget documents for facilities and equipment (T&E), which includes ATC modernization, show the $2.9 billion for the current year shrinking to $2.5 billion in fiscal 2005, assuming this is the amount ultimately appropriated.

The credibility gap seems greatest in moving technology from research and development into cost-effective deployment. For example, the DOT budget documents said, “A Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) evaluation found that FAA’s research program is effective, well-managed, and results-oriented, which helped inform the 2005 budget request for this program.”

This assuring statement is contradicted by recent reports from the DOT Office of The Inspector General (DOT/IG). On air traffic control modernization programs, the DOT/IG said that while improvement is noted, a number of problems are troubling:

• Committing to major acquisitions and entering into long-term cost-reimbursable contracts before user needs and agency requirements are fully understood;
• Misleading and unreliable cost and schedule estimates;
• Beginning new, costly, and complex programs while still funding programs that are significantly over cost and behind schedule (see www.oig.dot.gov/item_details.php?item=1195 and also www.oig.dot.gov/item_details.php?item=1113).

The program to reduce cabin injuries from in-flight turbulence is considered a priority effort, yet funding and people dedicated to the effort disappear in the fiscal 2005 request. In its budget document, the FAA said that its Flight Plan is linked to the agency’s budget requests. Even though the FAA has established a goal to reduce turbulence- induced serious cabin injuries to 12, down from an average of 18 per year, neither money nor people are linked to this effort in the budget.

The single largest program is devoted to reducing the fatal accident rate of air carriers. The specific initiatives outlined in the Flight Plan document outline programs whose potential costs run to hundreds of millions of dollars. Even one such program, the one listed at the top of the plan regarding improved fuel tank safety, could exceed the three percent increase shown on this line in the FAA’s budget – a tiny addition largely eaten up by inflation.

Job One: Reduce the Commercial Airline Fatal Accident Rate

From the FAA’s Flight Plan 2004-2008:

Strategy

• Expand FAA-industry partnerships and data-driven safety programs that prioritize and address risks before they lead to accidents.

Initiatives

• Implement Phase II of the Fuel Tank Safety Assessment for SFAR 88.
• Continue implementing the Air Transport Oversight System (ATOS).
• Continue implementing Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) initiatives.
• Take all actions necessary to resolve open National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendations (ASW note: Most of the “Most Wanted” items on the NTSB’s list have been stalled for years; see ASW, May 12, 2003).
• Ensure that safety oversight keeps pace with [industry] changes … especially for repair stations (ASW note, the DOT Inspector General has found FAA oversight of repair stations sadly lacking; see ASW, July 21, 2003).
• Pursue a targeted enforcement and oversight program (ASW note: such a program is people-intensive, requiring site inspections and analysts to mine the data).
• Reduce the risk of [runway] collisions. (ASW note: the FAA plans to spend up to $100 million deploying ASDE-X [airport surface detection equipment Model-X] and AMASS [airport movement area safety system] systems to help prevent runway collisions, but these surveillance and software systems provide warnings to tower controllers. They do not provide warnings directly to pilots, one of the prime performance criteria sought by the NTSB. As one industry observer quipped of the FAA’s breathless announcement last week of the first operational ASDE-X at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, Wis., “ASDE-X isn’t a system that sounds alarm bells for all concerned; it just ensures that everyone is looking up at the time of the fireball.”)
• Where practical, upgrade runway safety areas to meet standards (ASW note: lack of such areas contributed to a runway overrun at Burbank, Calif. See ASW, Aug. 26, 2002).

Source: www2.faa.gov/apo/strategicplan/FAA_Flight_Plan.pdf