
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, November 26, 1994                   TAG: 9411280022
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: NEWSDAY
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

ENFORCER OF AIR SAFETY HAS UNSAFE FLIGHTS

The pilots flew recklessly. The planes were missing crucial safety equipment. Virtually every federal flying rule was ignored.

It would be the picture of a terrible airline. But, amazingly, it's a description of the flight operations of the Federal Aviation Administration, the government agency responsible for ensuring the safety of U.S. air carriers.

In a little-noticed report, federal safety investigators have charged the FAA with a list of infractions that would scare any passenger. There were no approved manuals for flight operations, maintenance procedures or training programs. A pilot who died last year when he struck a mountain near Front Royal, Va., while flying in poor weather without flight instruments communicated to his copilots with cryptic hand signals and yet received glowing evaluations from his superiors. In a cost-cutting move, cockpit voice recorders weren't installed, and many planes were missing devices that warn pilots who are flying dangerously close to the ground.

With a fleet of 53 planes and about 1,000 pilots, the FAA runs an operation the size of a medium-size airline. Many flights are to inspect airports and other facilities. But investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency, found that the FAA's flight operations were spread across the agency's vast bureaucracy in five different areas, with little accountability, unqualified managers and poor safety oversight.

``The lack of formalized procedures, the lack of formalized training requirements, the refusal to deal with known personnel problems would be the kind of things that would ground a program,'' said Jim Burnett, a former chairman of the safety board who reviewed what he called the ``shocking'' report at Newsday's request. ``But this program is in the hands of the people who have the authority to ground an airline. An organization that is supposed to be the enforcer of air safety should be the paragon of it.''

The FAA has pledged to improve its performance and overhaul its operations in the wake of the embarrassing critique. Ed Fell, an FAA official who describes himself as the chief executive of the new FAA ``airline,'' said flight operations henceforth will meet or exceed the standards required for commuter carriers, which are not as stringent as those for big airlines.

``We want to move forward,'' he said. ``We want to make it better.''

But some government officials are skeptical that the FAA will do more than make superficial changes. Government documents show that, in the past nine years, several internal probes by the FAA had pinpointed many of the problems cited in the new report, but that few changes were made.

A 1989 inspection team, formed after an FAA jet crashed partly because the pilots had been drinking heavily the previous night, found many of the problems the safety board found five years later.

by CNB