I’ve received a number of emails addressing the FAA/Southwest hearings that were held yesterday. I’ll be talking about them more in this week’s PlaneBusiness Banter naturally, but just a couple of thoughts for this Friday morning.
One, Nick Sabatini from the FAA did not come across very well at all. Especially when he confirmed when he was first made aware of “potential” infractions with Southwest more than a year ago — and apparently did nothing about it.
Then again, not much about the FAA that came out was overly positive.
I especially liked it when Sabatini was put on the spot by one Congresswoman who suggested that no, this was not, as he had offered, the act of an individual, or individuals — it was representative of a business running with no checks, no balances, and a totally dysfunctional culture. In other words, no Mr. Sabatini — this was on your watch. You are responsible. This isn’t about a few “rogue” individuals screwing up.
But trust me, Southwest Airlines didn’t look very good either.
I also find it hard to believe, as management at Southwest contends, that they knew nothing about what was going on, in terms of the clearly problematic relationship between the airline and the regional FAA office, and its inspectors — until just recently.
Nah. As someone and I talked last night via email, the FAA is not some innocent bystander in some corporate cover-up here – fundamentally they are at the root of the problem. But Southwest is not blameless. They continued to fly aircraft when they shouldn’t have — because of the “relationship” they had with the regional FAA office.
There were no winners in that exercise yesterday.
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Just wondering if the reason the FAA turned a blind eye towards these violations is because they were looking forward to more lucrative employment at the airlines involved. And remember, FAA maintenance inspectors seldom look at actual airplanes other than a walk around where they may make you change a perfectly servicable tire, they usually only look at paperwork. This outsourcing of maintenance offshore is dangerous, I see it all the time first hand as a pilot for an international airline. Although interestingly enough some of the best line maintenance we get is in Manila where the mechanics are highly paid and want to keep their jobs, and Amsterdam where the KLM folks take real pride in their work like our US mechanics did before their jobs were outsourced. It used to be in a “heavy check” our inspectors would find about 2500 write ups on narrowbody aircraft and up to 7000 write ups on widebodies. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that when that inspection is outsourced at a fixed cost the folks doing the work want to “find” as few write ups as possible, since the less work they have to do the higher the profit margin. As a pilot who depends on maintenance I will take a US union mechanic anyday, don’t care if he/she is IAM, AMFA, Teamsters, etc.