Staffing and Training Shortages Hinder Oversight of Airline Safety

The impact of budget cuts is hurting the Federal Aviation Administration‘s (FAA) ability to oversee the safety of the airlines, particularly those not covered by the Air Transport Oversight System (ATOS). This is the system of continuous safety surveillance that is in place at the larger airlines, but which has not yet been implemented for almost 100 operators that carried about 200 million passengers in 2004 and that represent the fastest-growing segment of the industry.

The safety of these carriers is assessed through the National Work Program Guidelines (NPG), but the FAA hopes that it will provide more effective oversight when these operators are transitioned to the ATOS program in 2007. Therein lies the dilemma. The FAA has 585 inspectors for 16 airlines covered by ATOS, and 1,100 inspectors covering 99 so- called non-legacy airlines. That works out to an average of 36 inspectors for each ATOS-covered airline, and 11 inspectors on average for each NPG-covered airline.

It is generally recognized that ATOS takes more FAA inspectors to manage than NPG, yet the transitioning of more airlines to ATOS is occurring at the same time as the FAA inspection workforce is projected to decrease. Among the FAA inspectors assigned to the non-legacy carriers, the workforce is projected to decline by 195 inspectors per year. Details are contained in a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) 48-page report, “Aviation Safety: System Safety Approach Needs Further Integration into FAA’s Oversight of Airlines.”

Pending the transition of all carriers to ATOS, the FAA says it will consider the GAO’s recommendation to strengthen the Surveillance and Evaluation Program (SEP), which might be likened to a halfway house on the road to full ATOS implementation.

It should be noted that ATOS was developed after the ValuJet crash in 1996. ATOS represents a system safety approach that extends beyond periodically checking the airlines for compliance. Initially implemented for 10 major carriers in 1998, the ATOS program has since been expanded to 14 carriers, including two cargo operators. When the program expanded by these four carriers, the total size of the inspection teams grew by 30 percent, from 73 to 95 inspectors. Growing ATOS to cover the rest of the fleet by 2007 may not be realistic, the GAO report says. For one thing, the FAA has only “recently established” the goal of such expansion.

Secondly, there is a shortage of people to oversee the non-legacy airlines due to attrition, “workload shifts,” and a hiring freeze on replacements. “In 11 of the 13 FAA field offices that we contacted, officials indicated a shortage of different types of inspectors needed to oversee the non-legacy airlines, which has sometimes resulted in inspections being delayed or eliminated,” GAO said.

For example, the Washington, D.C., field office did not have a principal avionics inspector. The Atlanta, Ga., field office has been without a cabin safety inspector for a year and uses the inspector assigned to the Southern Regional Office.

Thirdly, the inspectors the FAA does have cite lack of training as a major problem. One way around this is to accept free training by the manufacturers. “The FAA has established safeguards to help preclude the appearance of a conflict of interest when [the] FAA accepts training from the entities it regulates,” GAO said.

Nevertheless, the FAA’s oversight problem seems to be the product of (1) staffing shortages and (2) the late commitment to a single oversight system like ATOS.

The Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS), the union representing FAA inspectors, was pleased to see the GAO drawing attention to the need for additional inspector staffing. “The GAO recognizes the risk of low inspector staffing when it comes to aviation safety,” said Linda Goodrich, PASS regional vice president. “We can only hope that the FAA is finally listening.”

“How can we be expected to keep pace with the fast growth of [the non-legacy carriers] when the FAA is actively chipping away at vital resources such as staffing?” she asked.

The hiring freeze, however, suggests that the FAA will not hire additional inspectors. The challenge may boil down to one of expanding ATOS with fewer inspectors.

(The full GAO reported may be read at http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-726)