September 16, 2008
What's at Issue
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters has ordered a thorough review of the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) safety organization and appointed an independent review team (IRT) to review the FAA's approach to safety and present a list of recommendations to strengthen the agency's oversight and smooth out the discord within various field offices.
The report titled Managing Risks in Civil Aviation: A Review of the FAA's Approach to Safety states the FAA's aviation safety field office staff has a "remarkable degree of variation in regulatory ideologies," and that such differences could lead to "mistakes in regulatory decision-making." In addition, the IRT was troubled by some of its findings stemming from the culture within the FAA and concluded that the agency's safety staff has an "unusually broad" range of views regarding regulatory style and choice. That finding highlights a concern that NATA has been voicing: the lack of consistency within the FAA is costing aviation businesses hundreds of millions of dollars.
Major Provisions
A summary of the 13 recommendations is provided below:
Airworthiness Directives (AD):
Recommendation #1
The report sites the FAA's right to ground any plane not in compliance with an applicable AD. Inspectors should not be required, or expected, to conduct any type of risk-assessment before taking action on AD non-compliance.
Recommendation #2:
The FAA should provide timely information about new AD requirements to all FAA field offices.
Voluntary Disclosure Reporting Programs (VDRP):
Recommendation #3:
The FAA's VDRP are vitally important to the future of aviation safety, and should be retained.
Recommendation #4:
The FAA must abide by the rules circumscribing these programs in order to prevent the erosion of compliance.
Recommendation #5:
VDRP data should be routinely analyzed at a higher level within the FAA.
Recommendation #6:
Voluntary disclosures should not be used as a performance metric based on an airline or its employees disclosing problems.
Recommendation #7:
Participation in all of the VDRP is dependent on the assurance of confidentiality of the information submitted. The FAA should resist any efforts to eliminate restrictions on disclosure.
Culture of the FAA:
Recommendation #8:
The Aviation Safety Office should devise means for identifying field offices where excessive divergence in regulatory ideologies exists.
Recommendation #9:
Training of managers and principal inspectors should cover contrasting regulatory views within the workforce, moderating extremes in regulatory style and optimizing regulatory effectiveness across a diverse team of inspectors.
Recommendation #10:
The FAA should deploy the Internal Assistance Capability to review the conduct of teams and offices that have extreme differences in regulatory ideology.
Recommendation #11:
The FAA should routinely monitor the culture and conduct of any Certificate Management Office where the managerial team has been constant for 3 years.
Recommendation #12:
The FAA should embrace its own role in risk identification and risk mitigation as it does with overseeing industry's Safety Management System implementations and expedite planning in this area.
Recommendation #13:
A study is recommended to assess the time-demands of the Air Transportation Oversight System and other IT implementations.
NATA Position
NATA issued a survey to its members in July titled How Does Lack of FAA Standardization Affect General Aviation Operators as a result of numerous NATA members having experienced varying interpretation of FAA regulations by the agency's Regional, Aircraft Certification (ACOs) and Flight Standards District Offices (FSDOs). Currently, there are 9 FAA regions, 10 ACOs and more than 80 FSDOs, each issuing approvals on a wide range of maintenance and operational requests made by regulated entities. These regulated entities include Part 135 on-demand charter operators, Part 145 repair stations, and Part 141 and 61 flight training facilities.
Affected regulated entities continue to be challenged by regulatory interpretations that vary from one inspector within one FSDO or ACO, to another. These varying interpretations of how to achieve or demonstrate compliance with FAA regulations are estimated to cost general aviation businesses hundreds of millions of dollars annually when previously approved actions are subject to "re-interpretation."
To view the results of the survey, click here.
Status
NATA is hopeful that the IRT report is the first step toward improving the inconsistencies in regulatory interpretations that the general aviation industry and others believe has become a constant problem among field offices within the FAA.
Click here to view the entire IRT report.
Staff Contact: Kristen Moore
Director, Legislative Affairs
kmoore@nata.aero