WASHINGTON — Since a
deadly airline crash near Buffalo in 2009, the government hasn’t kept
its promise to ensure that major airlines are holding their smaller
partners to the same safety standards, a federal watchdog says.
In
a new report, the U.S. Transportation Department’s inspector general
faults the Federal Aviation Administration for not taking steps to
encourage the big airlines “to consistently share safety information and
best practices” with regional airlines that operate flights under
contract for them.
That business link is known as code-sharing,
by which one airline sells tickets for seats on a flight operated by
another airline — United and United Express, for example.
More
than half of all airline flights in the U.S. are operated by regional
airlines using names such as United Express, Delta Connection, American
Connection and US Airways Express under code-sharing arrangements.
Three
regional airlines — JetBlue Airways, Delta Connection and US Airways
Express — fly out of Stewart International Airport in Orange County.
A
flight operated by regional carrier Colgan Air for Continental Airlines
under the name Continental Express crashed in February 2009 in
Clarence, N.Y., near Buffalo, killing 50 people. After that crash,
officials at the department and the FAA said they would begin reviewing
code-share contracts to see if they impinged on safety.
Investigators
cited pilot training lapses by Colgan as a factor. Colgan stopped
flying in September 2012 as part of its parent company’s restructuring.
A
National Transportation Safety Board investigation and congressional
hearings after the Colgan crash pointed out the differences in safety
cultures that sometimes occur between the two types of airlines.
For
example, at that time, some regional carriers were hiring pilots with
as few as 250 hours of flight experience, which FAA rules allow. Major
airlines typically hired pilots with about 10 times that much
experience.
After the crash near Buffalo, pilots’ unions and
safety advocates said regional carriers were driven to cut corners on
safety, including hiring inexperienced pilots at low wages, in part to
meet performance goals required under the code-sharing contracts.
Airlines that met their goals often earned more money under the
agreements, while those that failed to meet such goals were sometimes
penalized.
The FAA, despite earlier promises, isn’t reviewing any
code-share contracts for their safety implications, and the
Transportation Department reviews only a small share for their potential
economic impact, not safety, the transportation inspector general’s
report said.
“As a result, most domestic code-share agreements go
into effect without being reviewed by any (federal) regulatory entity,”
the report said.
The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report before its public release.
The
FAA also doesn’t have procedures in place “to advance the agency’s
commitment to ensure the same level of safety between mainline air
carriers and their code-share partners,” the report said.
Responding
to the report, Robert Rivkin, the Transportation Department’s general
counsel, said the FAA “believes that all carriers ... meet an
appropriate level of safety” regardless of whether they are in a
code-share agreement.
After the Buffalo-area crash, U.S.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and then-FAA chief Randy Babbitt
announced an industry-government “call to action” and held a
well-publicized safety summit. An airline safety “action plan” released
by FAA officials at the time promised the FAA and the Transportation
Department would “develop the authority and processes to review
agreements” between major carriers and their regional partners.
That
plan said one of its short-term goals was that “major carriers should
seek specific and concrete ways” to ensure that their smaller airline
partner carriers adopt and implement the larger company’s most effective
practices for safety. That was to include periodic meetings to review
safety data gathering programs and “to constantly emphasize their shared
safety philosophy.”
The transportation inspector general’s
report said that although the FAA sponsors biannual information-sharing
events for the airline industry, “it has not taken steps to encourage
mainline carriers to consistently share safety information and best
practices with their code-share partners.”
The FAA dropped its
plans to review code-sharing agreements because agency officials felt
the largest airlines had taken steps to increase their safety sharing
with their regional partners, the report said.
But the inspector
general found that while that was true of one large airline, it wasn’t
the case for others. The report reviewed four major and eight regional
carriers that participate in code-share agreements, but it did not
identify the airlines.
Rivkin replied in a letter to the
transportation inspector general that the FAA doesn’t make a distinction
between “major” and “regional” carriers because “all of those carriers
meet the same standards.”
Scott Maurer, whose 30-year-old
daughter, Lorin, died in the crash near Buffalo, said he was
disappointed but not surprised by the inspector general’s findings.
“These promises tend to end up becoming lip service,” he said. “It sounds good at the time, but there is no follow through.”
A
year after the 2009 crash, then-Continental Airlines CEO Jeffrey
Smisek angered victims’ families when he said it was the FAA’s
responsibility to ensure Colgan’s pilots were properly trained, not
Continental’s.
“We did not train those pilots. We did not
maintain those aircraft. We did not operate the aircraft. But we expect
them to be safe. We expect the Federal Aviation Administration to do its
job,” Smisek told a hearing of the House Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee.
The father of a law student killed in
the crash later cornered Smisek in the hallway outside the hearing room,
complaining that his daughter bought her ticket from Continental, not
Colgan.
Smisek now is the president and CEO of the holding company for United Airlines, which merged with Continental.
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