WASHINGTON (AP) - It's been 43 months since the last deadly airline
crash in the United States, the longest period without a fatal domestic
accident since commercial aviation expanded after World War II. That
sounds like unvarnished good news, but one consequence of having such a
remarkable record is that it's difficult to justify imposing costly new
safety rules on the economically fragile industry.
In
analyzing costs and benefits, federal rules assign a value of $6.2
million to each life saved. Even modest changes in regulations can cost
the industry hundreds of millions of dollars when spread across a number
of years.
"The extraordinary safety record that has been
achieved in the United States ironically could be the single biggest
reason the (Federal Aviation Administration) isn't able to act
proactively and ensure safety into the future," said Bill Voss,
president of the industry-funded Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria,
Va., which promotes global airline safety. The past decade has been the
airline industry's safest ever.
Last year, the FAA revised rules
on pilot work schedules and rest periods to address concerns that tired
pilots were making mistakes, sometimes with fatal results. But the
agency dropped requirements that would have extended the new rules to
cargo carriers. FAA officials said the rule changes would have cost the
cargo industry as much as $300 million over 10 years.
Transportation
Secretary Ray LaHood has urged cargo executives to voluntarily comply
with the new rules, but so far he's had no takers.
"We're doing
rulemaking in a system that is very, very safe," LaHood said in an
interview. "Sometimes it does get to be difficult to produce the cost
justification for the kinds of rules that we're promoting."
Last
year, the FAA missed a congressionally mandated deadline for issuing new
regulations on pilot training. Congress ordered the new rules after the
nation's last fatal airline crash, on Feb. 12, 2009, when a startled
captain overrode a key safety system as his airliner lost lift and began
to stall.
An investigation showed the plane would have been able
to fly had the captain responded correctly. Instead, it plummeted into a
house near Buffalo, N.Y., killing all 49 people aboard and a man in the
home. Investigators cited pilot training lapses by the regional
airline, Colgan Air, as a factor.
The FAA began work on revamping
training rules in 1999. Regulators had proposed new rules just before
the Colgan crash but effectively withdrew them for more work after the
accident. Final rules aren't scheduled to be issued until next year, and
airlines aren't expected to have to meet the new requirements until
February 2019 – 20 years after the FAA started work on the rules and 10
years after the Colgan accident.
Training regulations haven't
kept pace with changing technology, said John Goglia, a former National
Transportation Safety Board member. Planes are far safer than they used
to be, he said, "but it's much more difficult to fix the human being,
and that's who is responsible for most of the accidents these days."
"There are a lot of things on the table that will help, but they cost money and it's going very slowly," Goglia said.
Scott
Maurer, who lost his 30-year-old daughter, Lorin, in the Colgan crash,
said that in the past, families of accident victims and others seeking
safety improvements have been worn down and outlasted by the glacial
pace of the FAA's rulemaking process.
"We understand many are
feeling good about the interval without a crash fatality since Colgan
(Flight) 3407," said Maurer, of Moore, S.C. "We certainly believe our
efforts have helped to keep the focus on doing the right thing in
safety. But without rules to sustain this effort, we know the race to
the bottom will continue at regional airlines and the airline industry
as a whole as the push for profits becomes ever more important."
The
delays are due to complexities involved in drafting such rules and the
agency's obligation to carefully respond to objections raised by
industry and others, FAA officials said.
There has also been a
philosophical shift at the agency over the past decade that emphasizes a
collaborative relationship between regulators and airlines. This
collaborative approach works just as well as imposing one-size-fits-all
regulations on industry, and sometimes it works better, FAA officials
said.
Since the late 1990s, airlines and the FAA have placed a
greater emphasis on voluntary data-gathering programs that enable
airlines to spot and correct problems before they lead to accidents.
Airlines are also pooling information in search of industry-wide trends
and disclosing their problems to regulators through a
government-industry safety working group without fear of punishment. The
data collaboration has moved beyond analyzing past accidents and
incidents for safety lessons to searching for clues on emerging
vulnerabilities in day-to-day airline operations, FAA and industry
officials said.
Such data analysis has the greatest potential to yield future safety improvements, they said.
"We're
not waiting for a rules change to come out. We're out there using our
data and making these decisions," said Ken Hylander, senior vice
president for safety and security at Delta Air Lines and co-chair of the
government-industry working group.
For example, airlines
generally tell pilots not to abort takeoffs after a plane has reached a
speed of about 90 mph because in most cases it's safer to continue the
takeoff even if there's a safety concern. But occasionally pilots abort
takeoffs at high speeds anyway.
Using data automatically gathered
by a plane's computers, an airline can pinpoint exactly what was
happening at the moment that a decision to abort was made. Perhaps there
was a warning light that a cargo door was open or some other safety
indicator. Airlines can then take those examples and use them in
training programs to show pilots why they should continue a takeoff.
"There
are literally hundreds of people at all the airlines collecting and
analyzing data," Margaret Gilligan, FAA's associate administrator for
safety, said. "They are working with us voluntarily on all kinds of
committees to share that data among themselves because there are things
we want an airline to find out and fix for itself. But there are also
things we want to understand as an industry that might be systemic, that
any individual airline might not see the risk, but when we can combine
the data we can see there is a risk emerging that no one has identified
yet."
But Tom Haueter, who recently retired as head of the
National Transportation Safety Board's aviation safety office, said he
worries the industry and regulators are becoming complacent.
"I
talk to people all the time who say we have this fantastic accident rate
and we've cured all these problems," he said, "but I think if we forget
the lessons of the past, we might have to relive them."
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