A former Federal Aviation Administration inspector from Long Island, who says he was fired in 2002 for refusing to cover up glaring safety issues, predicts that the next major terrorist attack will involve airplanes blown up simultaneously in the air.
Richard Wyeroski told The Examiner that he warned the Department of Transportation’s inspector general that the next terrorist attack will likely involve a series of booby-trapped airliners detonated by cell phones. He bases this grim prediction on the fact that the FAA has allowed major commercial carriers to maintain and inspect aircraft in unsecure facilities overseas that the agency has never gotten around to checking itself.
The most recent incident involved Southwest Airlines, which was caught using unapproved parts in violation of FAA regulations. But instead of grounding the aircraft involved, FAA officials allowed them to continue flying provided they were inspected every seven days and the illegal parts were removed by December. “Third World countries are maintaining our aircraft overseas. This is playing Russian roulette with people’s lives,” Wyeroski said.
Maintenance facilities in the Philippines, El Salvador, Mexico, and South America, where much of the maintenance work is outsourced to save money, do not even require background checks or fingerprints of mechanics who work on planes, he says. “It would be very easy to hide explosive devices in the fuel tank,” Wyeroski, a pilot and former mechanic himself, added.
Even airlines that don’t take that risk and have their repairs done in the States are also at risk. Former FAA manager Gabe Bruno exposed the fact that since 1993, as many as 1,300 FAA-certified aircraft mechanics in the U.S. spent an average of $800 to purchase fraudulent licenses from corrupt “designated mechanical examiners” who are supposed to make sure that all FAA testing requirements have been met.
The FAA admitted in April that it did not notify the airlines that untrained mechanics may have been working on their aircraft.
