Originally published at: Is the FAA Being Asked to Do Too Much?
Modernization, new technologies and policy pressure are converging on an agency grappling with culture, coordination and capacity.
Possibly. I think the situation is more of refusal and foot dragging of long time managers in the FAA. The delays in enacting the BasicMed substitute of the third class medical is a classic example. It took congressional action to get the former FAA administrator to get this passed. That administrator was a career bureaucrat.
The planned FAA reorganization might be a way to remove people who are getting in the way of faster action. I went through a number of reorganizations during my 23 years in the federal government. In each case old jobs were abolished and new jobs were advertised. We could apply for the new jobs but there was no guarantee that we’d be selected. It’s easier to replace civil servants that way than to fire them due to all the documentation, regulations and unions that protect them. Still, trying to take on major projects like BVLOS integration, AAM, modernization of information systems and air traffic control overhaul is a lot for one agency to handle under time pressure. Different parts of the FAA are responsible for some of these projects but some of them fall on the same organizational segment. You can’t hire additional, experienced employees or bring on skilled contractors overnight to execute these projects. The administration needs to recognize that it’s better to take a slower pace that results in successful projects than to tackle everything at once and produce a series of failed projects.
I would definitely agree with that assessment. My medical was due when that legislation passed. I still had to have a full physical and examination, with an FAA doctor, because of their foot dragging. The only time one gets a quick response from the FAA is when one has an issue, and it’s with the pilot…
I don’t think this is a case of the agency being asked to move too fast, it is a situation where an agency has never been expected to move fast, and the culture cannot keep up. In my 30 year career, I have worked in IT and Operations in healthcare and the technology industry. I made the move out of healthcare to the technology industry because the pace of change in healthcare was too slow, and the constant pace of change in the tech industry excited me and gave me an environment of having to constantly learn. It drew me in and while I still cross boundaries, I love it.
I do a lot of CIO / CTO level consulting on a variety of technology topics, and while most of my activity is with large global enterprises, I also work with Federal, State, and local government agencies as well. The culture difference I see between being with a large manufacturing organization one week, and a federal government agency the next is night-and-day. Enterprise customers are looking for opportunities to improve, to increase productivity and to get ahead of their competitors. The federal government customers are more concerned about how they can get more headcount, and rarely is there a discussion about how to repurpose technology to do different tasks than what they have been doing for the past 10 years (an eternity in the tech sector).
When you have an organization the size of the FAA, there is no reason you cannot delineate the change agents from those serving the safety functions. Yes, you need some senior controllers, inspectors, and feet-on-the-ground safety individuals to participate in the governance of the change groups because it is these people who know the nuances of what a controller or inspector deals with on a daily basis. However, this relatively small group of experienced individuals can participate in these working groups without disrupting the daily activities of those actually doing the job. Small operational changes can be implemented in minuscule amounts, creating relatively little friction for those actually delivering the changes.
I think we have been conditioned to accept that the federal government is slow and unable to move quickly because of its size, but this is one of those self-fulfilling-prophesies because unless we create the expectation that these agencies move and deliver in the same way we expect U.S. industry to move, then they never will have a sense of urgency.
Unfortunately, the government’s way of fixing these kinds of problems is to go out and hire some giant, multinational consulting firm to develop a process, socialize it, and spend a year just coming up with a plan (if I were doing a presentation right now, I would put up this as a slide Consulting - Despair, Inc.) . This could all be done using internal resources if the government would just train some of their internal people on how to do these processes. Someone can learn the skills to facilitate these kinds of organizational change in about 3 months if they do it in a full-immersion, boot-camp like training. But…that isn’t how the government works, and no one is willing to put that expectation on a government employee.
As someone focused on GA safety for 20 years, I hope this effort includes strengthening, streamlining, and improving access to the vast GA safety resources within the FAASTeam. Like them or not, if done right, the GA accident rate WILL improve when real changes are addressed.
I don’t believe the agency is being asked to do too much, nor is that really the question. What they are being asked to do is the same thing Australia did in the mid-late 1990s. They commissioned an entirely new ATC automation system, complete with two new en route centers, consolidated the staff of the previous five centers into those two new buildings, and transitioned from a government agency to government-owned corporation, and did so successfully. That also included implementing ADS (both -B and -C, if I remember correctly) on top of new ATC operating procedures based on the new automation. While the scope of their operation is smaller, they started with about 5,500 total employees while the FAA has something near 46,000, not including support contractors. So, can all this be done? Based strictly on the precedent and numbers, yes.
The real question is whether this group is being asked to do too much. This is an agency affectionately known as the Tombstone Agency. While they claim to be “data driven,” they use data to not move. The current safety management process originated from the Challenger explosion. Over the years, that process has become little more than a bureaucratic check box that would not have prevented the decisions leading up to a Challenger-type incident. The rationale would be that there was no data to support an impending disaster. In other words, because it hasn’t happened yet, it can’t happen all trends in the data be damned. Then we have a DCA-type incident and low and behold, they now have data that it could happen.
There was an interview with someone who was a long-time air traffic controller turned lawyer a few months back. He supported Duffy’s plan, said it was essential, and wished it well. But he also said it could not be turned over to the same management who have created the current problems and culture, or at a minimum did nothing to change them or it was doomed. That is the problem.
Since safety, maintenance, and infrastructure are not glamorous the organization and upper management have largely ignored them, gravitating to things that are “glitzy.” That includes things that are of no benefit to anybody but sound great on paper to those on Capitol Hill. Some could have never worked, but the goal is to get funding and build an empire. All the while, the basic functions were taken for granted because, you guessed it, “there is no data…”
In short, asking an organization that strives to end every day the same way yesterday ended to change in any way is a tall order. The upside is the recent reorganization appears to be driven from the very top and, as someone stated earlier, potentially makes it easier to get rid of people and entire organizations that are not performing or even needed. But I’ll temper my hopefulness with the understanding that the only two things that will survive a meteor strike are cockroaches and bureaucracies.
Are they being asked to do too much? Simple answer is no. The ask to meet these requirements has just been long over due in coming.
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