decades ago, on 2 September 1998, Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the waters
near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada. Some of the milestones that have
transpired over the intervening ten years are: my two sons graduated from
high school and are attending college; my daughter and her family moved to
upstate New York, and I continue to struggle, on a daily basis, to make any
meaningful progress without my husband, Ray, who was killed in the crash, by
my side.
When I established the
International Aviation Safety Association (IASA), on 4 March 1999, it was my
passionate desire to right many of the erroneous and long overdue aviation
safety issues which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had willfully
overlooked. The deceitful cloak of Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), the FAA’s
guiding force for inaction, should have
been repudiated and trashed the night of the crash, when 229 innocent human
beings were killed. The “translation” of CBA (in my humble opinion) is:
Enough human beings must be killed in a
plane crash before correcting a dangerous situation, in order for the “fix”
to be considered economically feasible.
It is a pragmatic and
bureaucratic perspective that disavows human worth and familial
affiliations. The same CBA model is applied to the economics of any proposed
routine (and non-lethal) technical fix to airplane hardware. There’s no
discrimination for human worth.
Someone had to speak
out for all the senseless deaths and the many families destroyed by the
FAA’s lack of attention to:
-
The dangers of the metalized Mylar thermal acoustic insulation blankets,
present throughout the airframe and highly flammable when ignited by an
arcing wire. The FAA was alerted to this deadly hazard by the Civil Aviation
Administration of China (CAAC) in 1996, two years prior to the crash of
Flight SR-111. The CAAC warned of blanket flammability
and its tendency to propagate fire rapidly
after experiencing a severe fire on a Chinese-registered B737, but
their letter fell on deaf ears.
-
To add insult to injury, an FAA Designated Alteration Station, or DAS (Santa
Barbara Aerospace), approved the installation of the in-flight entertainment
system (IFEN), which proved incompatible with the doomed Boeing MD-11’s
electrical configuration. It would later be confirmed that the technical
expertise necessary to approve or deny such an installation was manifestly
absent - yet the system was more or less “rubber stamped”
in an expedited and bogus
“approval” process. The urgency was
predicated upon the profits expected to be made from this in-flight gambling
system.
All of these subsequent
revelations translate into a
supreme lack of oversight by the FAA.
And we are now seeing from Congressional
hearings that the FAA is too “cozy” with the airlines it is supposed to
regulate (see Aviation Safety & Security Digest, ‘Congress Seeks Separation
of Agency From Airlines,’ homepage).
Any reasonable human
being would believe that each and every one of the Canadian Transportation
Safety Board’s (TSB) recommendations, contained in their final report of the
Swissair accident, would have been acted upon by the FAA with the utmost
expediency. That being said, let us take a look at how important the FAA
feels the deaths of the 229 individuals really are, by looking at where some
of those recommendations stand 10 years after the crash.
As recently as 29 June
2008, a fire broke out in the attic area of a B767, operated by Airborne
Express, which eerily resembles what the pilots aboard Swissair Flight 111
experienced. The aircraft was not airborne at the time, and it will be very
interesting to learn from the investigation just how similar this incident
is when compared to what transpired almost 10 years ago aboard Flight
SR-111.
It would appear that
not all flammable materials have been stripped from aircraft, as the TSB
urged. The Mylar thermal acoustic insulation blankets were ordered removed,
but not without the FAA dragging its feet for a full year before giving the
airlines an additional 5 years to accomplish the task. What about other
flammable insulation materials? One of the TSB’s strong recommendations
stated:
That regulatory authorities
quantify and mitigate the risks associated with in-service thermal acoustic
insulation materials that have failed the Radiant Panel Test.
Response Rating:
Unsatisfactory
Is it
possible that ten years after the crash of Flight SR 111 the TSB classifies
this recommendation as “Unsatisfactory”? Apparently, that seems to be the
case. This falls into the realm of complete and utter lack of respect for
all those killed in the crash, not to mention a failure on the part of the
FAA to accomplish its primary mandate as safety watchdog.
Another
incident
that
calls FAA oversight into question is the recent grounding of hundreds of
American Airline flights because
of inattention to
known wiring
issues on their MD-80 fleet. American Airlines then
assured the flying public that safety was
never compromised. I find that claim rather absurd, considering the wide
reaching effect of the grounding. At a time when airlines are
struggling to remain solvent during a very difficult economic period for
their industry, it is an insult and a nonsense for them to downplay the
seriousness of the situation in such a
PR-oriented dismissive fashion.
The
stunning lack of FAA oversight is a phenomenon that recurs over and over
again. It is this writer’s opinion that oversight should not stop at issuing
Airworthiness Directives (ADs). It should include diligent follow-up,
ensuring every AD issued is complied with within the parameters set forth.
Trusting the airlines to comply, without any oversight by the issuing
agency, is akin to leaving an unattended cookie jar on a table and directing
children not to partake.
It would
appear the FAA and Congress can live with the regulator being widely
referred to as “the Tombstone agency.” While we are all expected to learn
from our mistakes, in order to prevent history from repeating itself, the
FAA appears not only to lack oversight,
but insight and
foresight as well. □
