Barbara Hollingsworth: FAA, Congress ignore pilots' many safety warnings
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Examiner Columnist
September 8, 2009
Pennsylvania-based Business Travel Coalition is asking Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate Amerijet International. Sixty-two pilots and flight engineers went on strike Aug. 27 when one of the air cargo carrier's planes lost cabin pressurization and was forced to dump 23,000 gallons of fuel into the waters off Miami.
Fatigued, overworked employees are protesting what they say are working conditions in one of the most congested airspaces on the planet that "are worse than the sweatshops of the 1930s" -- and which put "schools, neighborhoods, the environment and the flying public at significant risk each and every day."
Good luck with that. For at least six years, Congress and the FAA have been warned about shoddy maintenance and pilot fatigue by former commercial airline pilots with sterling safety records, such as former United Airlines Captain Dan Hanley, now head of the Whistleblowing Airline Employees Association.
Many pilots like Hanley were forced out of the cockpit after they filed federally mandated safety complaints. Other airline employees are also trying to get the FAA to do something about toxic cabin air they say has left many of them chronically ill.
But if Congress and the FAA have so far managed to ignore repeated safety warnings from veteran pilots and flight attendants in planes that carry hundreds of passengers, there's little hope that they will pay the slightest bit of attention to pilots who ferry cargo to and fro.
The FAA has even been allowed to ignore National Transportation Safety Board recommendations that gliders be outfitted with transponders with impunity, despite the deaths of nine people.
The agency charged with ensuring safety in the skies has become one of its major impediments.
"With all the political rhetoric of change and improvements at the FAA and in Congress, there has been no mention made of forced psychiatric evaluations by airline-appointed mental health professionals, which is the gun being held to the heads of pilots and other employees if they speak out," Hanley said.
In fact, Dr. Michael Berry, one of the doctors who medically grounded former Continental pilot Newton Dickson after he complained about lack of training and pilot fatigue -- the same issues NTSB cited as the main causes of the crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 in Buffalo, N.Y., that killed 50 people -- is now heading the FAA's medical certification office.
"Isn't it strange that the Department of Transportation, the 'parent' of the FAA, will allow me to drive hazmat-laden 18-wheeler tanker trucks solo, but its agency, the FAA, will not allow me to fly airplanes as second in command?" asked Dickson, who currently works for the Transportation Security Administration and is still appealing his grounding despite losing an administrative hearing.
Noting that he has passed every medical test he's ever been given and that other doctors have failed to confirm Berry's diagnosis of epilepsy, Dickson wonders: "Isn't medical evidence required to ground a pilot and to keep him grounded?" We thought so, too.
Another former Continental pilot told The Examiner that Dr. Berry charged him up to $300 per visit for close to two years and "kept playing games with me, not returning my phone calls, and promising that if I jumped through more hoops, I'd get my [pilot's] license back. I knew there was some racket going on, because Berry gave me tasks he had to know were impossible to complete. He put me in a loop knowing there was no way out."
When I called Dr. Berry at the FAA, his assistant told me that he would not directly comment on these and other former pilots' accusations.
In 1996, the NTSB Board condemned the practice of yanking pilots' medical certificates to address personnel issues, including filing safety complaints that would force their employers to spend money correcting them. "This would obviously be an abuse of process to be avoided assiduously," the board wrote. But when pilots with tens of thousands of hours of flight time still report that airlines are doing just that, the FAA continues to ignore them.
So does Congress, which is supposed to be overseeing the FAA on behalf of the flying public. The representatives of the people apparently have better things to do than making sure their constituents don't get killed.
Barbara F. Hollingworth is The Examiner's local opinion editor.
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