Small-plane overseers come up short on safety: Our view

The Editorial Board, 9:23 p.m. EDT July 2, 2014 

Airline travel has become remarkably safe. Although a South Korean 777 hit a seawall in San Francisco a year ago and killed three people, no U.S. passenger airliner has crashed since Colgan Air Flight 3407 went down near Buffalo in 2009.

Too bad the same thing can't be said about the tens of thousands of flights every day that make up "general aviation" — everything from small private planes and medevac helicopters to crop dusters and business jets.

FAA: We're working to reduce accidents

Year after year, this segment of aviation suffers more than 1,000 accidents. Some are as minor as scraping a wing, but far too many are crashes. They kill 300 to 400 people a year and injure many others. 

Most of this is the fault of pilots whose overconfidence, lack of skill or momentary inattention get them into mortal trouble. Aggressive safety reminders to pilots helped bring down the general aviation accident rate until the improvement stalled in the late 1990s.

But as USA TODAY's recent investigative series "Unfit for Flight" showed, accidents are also the preventable result of airplane defects or manufacturing lapses that federal agencies charged with airline safety could do much more to identify and fix.

For example, the National Transportation Safety Board is quick to blame pilots for most accidents. But the agency's investigations of general aviation accidents can be cursory, and the inquiries sometimes rely on manufacturers to say whether something they made played a role.

Subsequent lawsuits have revealed that some pilots were done in by safety defects or design errors that manufacturers had denied or covered up. USA TODAY's Tom Frank found 21 court verdicts ordering manufacturers cleared by the NTSB to pay nearly $1 billion after juries found their products contributed to accidents.

Further, the NTSB's heavy focus on what causes aircraft to crash can obscure why pilots and passengers die, or are badly injured, in accidents they might have survived. For example, evidence existed for years that fuel tanks on the Robinson R-44 helicopter could rupture and cause fatal fires in otherwise survivable accidents. Last year, Australian aviation authorities mandated changes to the R-44's tanks after three fatal post-crash fires. Finally this January, the NTSB asked the Federal Aviation Administration to do the same here, but the FAA refused.

The FAA has often declined to order safety retrofits to older aircraft for fear of the costs to aircraft owners. An example is the agency's refusal to order installation of shoulder belts in older planes, despite statistics that show they could cut death and serious injury rates in half.

More troubling is the FAA's policy of allowing manufacturers to sell new aircraft that don't meet current safety standards — as long as the new models are based on a previously approved design, some of which are decades old. That's like allowing Ford to sell new Mustangs without air bags or anti-lock brakes.

Aviation groups insist that general aviation is safer than activities such as boating or motorcycle riding. That misses the point. Small planes could be safer, and there are many ways to make that happen. For something as important as general aviation, that's where the focus should be.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

Source:  http://www.usatoday.com