Source: USA Today Editorial

4 years, no plane crashes, but new risks emerge

If you're reading this in the crush of an airport lobby, take heart in one statistic: There hasn't been a major jetliner crash in the USA in nearly four years.

The domestic airline industry has an enviable record for safety, but don't get too comfortable. Financial turmoil, outsourcing of airline maintenance and the federal government's lagging performance as a safety watchdog threaten that accomplishment.

Sorry to spoil your flight. But passengers have a right to know what's going on beneath the silvery skins of all those jetliners.

Fliers are certainly familiar with some of the turbulence in the airline industry. But putting several dismal strains together paints an unsettling picture:

• Failing finances. Eight airlines are in bankruptcy reorganization, including three of the nation's largest: United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines. Each is looking to trim costs. Several are battling their unions over wages and benefits. Stressed, unhappy employees are handling crucial jobs. At Northwest, union mechanics have been on strike since August, and, by now, most of the strikers have been replaced.
• Increased outsourcing. Nine of the nation's largest airlines, many of which handled the bulk of their maintenance work in-house for years, farmed out an average 54% to outsiders last year. About 4,500 of these third-party repair stations are located in the USA; 676 are overseas, in places as far-flung as El Salvador and China.
• Lagging oversight. There's nothing wrong per se with outsourcing repairs, as long as the Federal Aviation Administration is strictly watching these third parties. But Transportation Department Inspector General Ken Mead told a Senate subcommittee last week that the FAA has been too slow to respond to this sea change in maintenance.

In a 2003 study, Mead's office found the FAA had not shifted its focus "to where the maintenance was actually performed" — at outside repair shops. For example, inspectors for a carrier that outsourced nearly half its maintenance did 400 inspections in-house, but only seven at the outside repair stations.

Overseas, the 138 FAA-certified repair stations in France, Germany and Ireland are inspected not by the FAA but by aviation authorities in those countries. Their reports to the FAA were, in some cases, "incomplete or incomprehensible," many of them written in a foreign language, Mead said.

FAA's vows to complete major reforms by last summer have slipped, according to the inspector general's office.

A shrinking inspection staff, smaller than the one the FAA had last year, is facing these challenges. FAA's vows to complete major reforms by last summer have slipped, according to the inspector general's office.

The FAA disagrees with Mead's assessment and maintains the situation is under control. That's eerily reminiscent of the FAA of a decade ago, which denied increasing signs that overburdened inspectors were not keeping up with a swiftly changing industry.

The fiery crash of a ValuJet plane in Florida's Everglades in 1996 shook the FAA and Congress out of their torpor. The crash, in which 110 died, revealed weak monitoring of outside contractors by the airline and the FAA. The government reformed its oversight — changes followed by years of safety gains.

Everyone wants to maintain that enviable record, even as the industry lurches through painful change. But dismissing the warnings of knowledgeable critics is no way to achieve that urgent goal.