dreamflight767

LOL. People, the FAA does NOT want (nor do they care) to hear about any complaints/concerns/violations.

They do not have skills, competence, resources, or general interest in these things even though they tell you safety is their top priority. Employees of the FAA want to collect their pay check, “work” from home, and do as little as possible with regards to their actual duties. A FAA employees’ biggest priority is using work time to bid on positions with hire salaries so they can get paid more to look for their next higher paying job.

If you understand this, you will understand why the FAA is broken, ineffective, inefficient and will never get fixed.

1 reply

bucc5062

Unless you work for or worked for the FAA such a blanket statement does a disservice to a lot of people that do good work at the FAA.

What would your solution be? get rid of it? Privatize it and in doing so how would that improve safety in US aviation. The article’s topic is that the whistle blower program is broke, but how do you get around this valid viewpoint:

“It’s horribly stressful,” Devine said. “Whistleblowers are at the crossroads of the contradictory values we’re raised with in this country: It’s good to be a team player, but it’s not good to be a sheep.

“We trust rugged individualists and don’t like rats or squealers, but we also don’t respect people who look the other way. These are incredibly fundamental contradictions in people knowing who they are when it really, really counts.”

Avweb just completed a survey and at last view over 85% did not want to see ATC privatized. Since ATC is under FAA control that would see to indicate that most people involved in or aware of aviation feel the FAA is doing a decent job.

After reading the article, though it was light on concrete examples, what I could tell is that if there is rot, it is at the top and starts to bleed down, so maybe instead of ridiculing a vast majority of those trying to do a good job, maybe just focus on the asshats at the top, like FAA Administrators that are wholly owned by the political process which these days means big money.

What might help is when an airline company is found violating either regulations or out right laws, stop giving them fines and instead actually prosecute executives that push the “profit first, safety last” mentality.

pilot135pd

Actually they don’t ignore the complaints, they just cover them up if they’re against their fellow FAA inspectors, even when you supply recordings.

Now regarding complaints against air carriers, my NDA won’t let me say much but yes, they do take whistleblower complaints and they do hit companies when you write to them with clear evidence showing that the company is pencil whipping inspections on their aircraft and flat out lying on other forms.

Yes then the whistleblower gets fired and the FAA and OSHA are useless, so make sure you keep all those records and all evidence because it takes about 2 years after you sue the company but you will get tons of money, because companies don’t want all that evidence to become public and they will settle a few weeks before the federal court date.

I also agree with what was said about prosecuting company CEOs instead of just fines when they clearly have been provided the evidence of pencil-whipping and they just transfer the empoyee to anther base and do nothing to correct the problem, then fire the employee.

ssobol

On the other hand you have to watch for disgruntled former employees calling the FAA to cause trouble for their former employer.

Will1

I have read, first hand, only one whistle-blower letter to a regulatory agency. The author was an experieced and well-educated engineer, yet the letter was barely comprehensible in parts, lacked specifics which could be cofirmed or refuted, and, overall, was written at the level of a fourth-grade student. It came across a little bit like an angry, rambling rant. The letter was simply unusable by anyone without an understanding of the basis of the allegations or insider knowledge of the organization concerned. Nonetheless, I know that the agency did ask the organization to respond to the allegations, and since the allegations were so poorly written, it was easy for the organization to convincingly refute them all.

I can’t say that the same applies to the allegations referred to in this article, but I can imagine that the FAA is not ignoring whistle-blower “complaints”, but it has set the “sufficient information” bar high enough that only the most professionally-presented allegations make it through the filter. Perhaps this is to protect the organizations that the FAA oversees, and thus itself, or perhaps it is because the FAA has not the staffing to investigate poorly-documented allegations. If it is the latter case, and I suspect that is so, then I watch for the potential civil service budget cuts stemming from the promise of “smaller governent” in the future with engaged interest.

1 reply

WBJohn

I fail to see what possible benefit the FAA could gain from not investigating credible whistleblower reports. Quite to the contrary, they would have much to lose if a failure to investigate resulted in an aviation incident or accident, particularly in terms of their credibility and perception of competence. I can see, on the other hand, lots of potential upside from the whistleblower’s viewpoint: He’s pissed at the company so can give them a headache by reporting some perceived defect (with no consequences to him if the report is maliciously bogus); or, if he believes his allegation is rock solid and will lead to a financial reward, but in fact it’s nothing, again he experiences no downside. The people I’ve known who work for the FAA take their responsibilities seriously and try to do a good job. They don’t deserve to be smeared with a broad brush.

2 replies

henderrj

As much as I despise the McDonald Douglas run Boeing, and even more the former Boeing execs who accepted such graft to turn the company over to said MD execs - I lived in the Pacific NW for four decades - trusting the Seattle Times is not safe.

I have many friends in the FAA and who are or were in Boeing. Sure there are problems, and maybe this sometimes happens. But I doubt it very much. All the men and women I know (with a few exceptions) intend to do a good job, and do it correctly. No one is perfect, but they aim that way.

wdpalmer

I second bucc5062’s remarks about the FAA. Lots of good, responsible, and dedicated people at the bottom of the food chain, but all we hear about comes from and is vetted by the suits at the top. With a tip o’ the hat to AVWeb’s fine reporting, I also gotta take exception to the headline and subhead of this article, because these items, along with dreamflight767’s disparaging comments, cast ALL of the FAA’s around-45000 employees in a bad light. Both headline and subhead use the words “ignore” and “dismiss,” which primes the reader for more FAA smear-food and suggests that is all the FAA does with whistleblower complaints - ignore and dismiss them - and ultimately reinforces the perception of the FAA as our common enemy. Granted, headlines have to be attention-getting, and the AvWeb staff has done their job well in that regard. But the second paragraph deflates the smear balloon when the quoted Seattle Times article notes the complaints were dismissed “on preliminary review.” So, this means the FAA did in fact review the complaints, and did not “ignore” or “dismiss” them.

007

There’s always at least one person out these that just doesn’t get it. Is the FAA perfect? Nope! But neither is Boeing, or any other aviation organization. There’s always going to be ladder climbers and those just collecting a paycheck. I’m sure that dreamflight767 is the perfect example of how the world should run. We should all bow to him!

My husband is an FAA Inspector and investigates these complaints. He’s worked hard for 20+ years in the FAA and is darn near giddy when he gets a new case to investigate. I’ve witnessed him go to the end of the earth to find evidence to substantiate a reporter’s claims. Sometimes there is merit to the complaint and sometimes there is not, much like anything else in life. Sometimes a complainant will throw anything against the wall to see what will stick. Others use the FAA to rattle companies during contract negotiations.

If you’re looking for perfection, it’s not this process, but it’s not bad either. Think what you want about the FAA, but as a longtime corporate pilot, I’ve met many hardworking, dedicated and passionate men and women in the FAA. So there!

Planeco

An FAA complainant often provides vague accusations without any meat (evidence) and - despite momentary displaying braveness and courage - also often chooses to remain anonymous which makes the job of the investigator extremely difficult resulting in a ‘surface investigation’ that too many times leads to a dead end due to lack of information. It surely gets documented by the FAA and may put pressure on the certificate holder to be very compliant in the near term but without complete cooperation by the complainant, the complaint itself often goes no where. And of the main types of complaints (hotline, local, and whistleblower), the latter requires that identity be provided to move forward.

c.alburn

I’m always bothered by broad brush accusations against any large organization. I’ve been rubbing shoulders with FAA employees for over half a century, and although I’ve met a few who did their jobs poorly, the vast majority I’ve known have been dedicated to their duties.

I’ve no doubt that there are similar situations with Boeing or Airbus or Textron or any other large organization. Of course there are those who are just there to collect a paycheck—that’s common in all large organizations. On the other hand, I believe that the vast majority do their jobs well.

If corrections need to be made to either the FAA or the airplane manufacturers, I suggest that instead of maligning the worker bees, maybe it’s more appropriate to examine the agency and the companies from the top down.

Gregg_Bender

Some aren’t thinking about a lawsuit or a big payout. They don’t want a bunch of new tombstones on their watch if they can avoid it. I know of what I speak here.

Skypark

Vetting a complaint is in no way “ignoring” it. It would be ridiculous for FAA to immediately launch a full-scale investigation of every complaint before even evaluating it, and the 40% rejection rate quoted prior to initiating fact-finding in the Boeing complaints sounds quite reasonable. Yes, the whistleblower process provides a valuable alternative pathway for an individual who has struck a ceiling in fighting some observed or perceived malpractice, but as alluded to in the Seattle Times article it also is a popular vehicle utilized by employees with long-running histories of conflict with their employers.

1 reply

Will1

Regulatory agencies audit their client organizations on a regular basis. After, say, a decade of basically positive audits with only minor administrative findings, can you imagine the impact on the auditors if they must abruptly reverse their findings and state that they have suddenly found that the organization lacks key compentances or willfully ignores agreed procedures? That, I imagine, is career ending stuff. And can you imagine the impact on the managers of those auditors? It gives new meaning to “Not on my watch.”

1 reply

rpstrong

To follow up on that: The paper lumped duplicate complaint rejections - which would seem to be justified - with questionable ones in arriving at their 90% initial ‘ignorance’ rate.

What is the breakdown of that 90%? Do duplicates make up 80% of the rejections - or 8%?

It would seem to be germane.

Pete_P

…that’s an indication that something is amiss somewhere.

The natural law of momentum of very large bodies holds: they do not change their behavior abruptly. And as the change in behavior occurs, the accelerated growth in wreckage piling up by the wayside becomes more and more noticeable.

So, either the auditing effort (conducted by a much, much smaller body) has been slipshod over a substantial number of years or the nature of the auditing has itself suddenly changed, perhaps acquiescing to factors that render its results invalid.

The situation aviation finds itself now is clearly evidence of the latter, as an accelerating number of airplanes simply haven’t been falling out of the sky due to design or manufacturing defects. Quite the contrary. The oft-told fable of McDonnell Douglas coming in and overnight corrupting Boeing’s entire management, administrative, engineering, manufacturing and support services employees, about 150,000 of them, is just that, a fable. That it became embedded in popular culture is understandable when the populace (which includes many of Boeing’s employees) doesn’t have the wherewithal to recognize the fallacy of such abrupt change or notice that there isn’t an accelerating or even linear growth of the pile of wreckage and so accepts the unprofessional reporting as “news.” But the fable’s blind acceptance by some professional and analytical bodies within the industry casts doubt on the competence of those bodies.

It was only a matter of time before an accident resulted in a similarly sensational “investigation” by the news media which relied on those fabled facts as the basis for rampant speculation that falsely pinned the cause on the design, which Congress incompetently and irresponsibly swallowed hook, line and sinker, and then arrogantly demanded a fix. That led the FAA to make a hasty commitment to “100% oversight” of all design and manufacturing operations at the company, which in theory requires one FAA agent for every Boeing employee involved in the design or manufacture of an airplane, watching their every move, getting in the way, adding to the process documentation and guaranteed to introduce far more deficiencies than it prevents.

Predictably, after a few years, when a door improperly installed while under 100% oversight blew out during climb, instead of the aim of 100% oversight being deemed stupid, it was deemed not yet achieved due to inadequate staffing and since that couldn’t be resolved in short order, operations at Boeing were throttled to enable 100% oversight.

The decision to throttle operations was aided by the failure of the NTSB to show any sign of identifying the root cause within a reasonable timeframe. The NTSB knows on which side its bread is buttered and chose to pursue Congress’ prejudice of the cause rather than follow its long established, reasonable and proven investigative process. As a result, seven months after the door blew out they were publicly complaining to Congress that Boeing was not being cooperative in furnishing paperwork that a month later—after a public hearing—they admitted didn’t exist. The nonexistence was known to the public less than three weeks after the blowout.

Ludicrous? Yes, but it’s the ludicrous reality that we hang our hats on when we board an airplane: Safety, in spite of the regulators, the lawmakers, the investigators and above all, the news fabricators (some of them—pilots!)