DATE: Wednesday, May 21, 1997               TAG: 9705220775

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT 

                                            LENGTH:   80 lines

BOOK GIVES SCARY DETAILS OF FAA

IF YOU ALREADY need more than a couple of hospitality-cart martinis to feel comfortable flying the friendly skies, then don't read Mary Schiavo's ``Flying Blind, Flying Safe.'' You'll never board a plane again.

Schiavo, a former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation under Presidents Bush and Clinton, dared to take a long look at the industry insider's world of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which was under her purview. What she found is enough to make many of us wonder whether flying is worth the risk - and whether the FAA isn't overdue for a major overhaul.

Although many Americans perceive the FAA as a watchdog that oversees airlines, Schiavo (who is aided here by New York Times reporter Sabra Chartrand) claims this is so much public-relations hokum. According to the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, she writes, ``The FAA's primary purpose is to `. safety is low on the act's list of policies. The first priority is to promote the business of aviation.''

Contrary to a popular notion, then, it wasn't the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 that led to the lax inspections and oversight that accompanied soaring profits and (paradoxically) often-troubled discount airlines in the 1980s and '90s. The pro-industry slant that is now so prevalent in the FAA was basically built into the agency's mission statement two decades earlier and has never been changed.

As Schiavo demonstrates in the first half of the book in compelling, chapter-by-chapter fashion, the FAA regularly relies on airlines and manufacturers to check off on inspections themselves; shrugs at the burgeoning ``bogus parts'' industry that is unregulated and may pose a long-term threat to plane safety; looks the other way when cities use FAA-allotted passenger tax funds on projects other than airport improvement; once paid $1.6 million to a cult leader who ran training seminars that were designed to humiliate FAA managers; wasted nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money by mismanaging a now-scuttled, computerized air traffic control system; and routinely compares the loss of life in crashes with what the cost to the airline industry would be in safety measures to prevent it.

``The FAA will not do anything (regarding safety regulations) until people die,'' Schiavo claims.

She may be to the airplane what Ralph Nader was to the automobile. And ValuJet is her Corvair. Months before the May 1996 ValuJet crash that killed 110 people in the Florida Everglades, Schiavo had been pushing for the FAA to look into the newly formed discount carrier. Despite the meteoric growth and lax management that led the airline to have ``an accident rate 14 times that of its equals,'' ValuJet was hardly an FAA target. In fact, in its 1996 Strategic Plan, the agency dubbed ValuJet ``a model others, including the FAA, should emulate,'' Schiavo says. ``The FAA supported such winning business propositions and was reluctant to enforce restrictions that might hobble growth.''

Even after FAA staff in Atlanta had found enough reasons to ask that ValuJet be closed down, ValuJet lobbyists quieted dissent and successfully enlisted Transportation Secretary Federico Pena to the airline's cause. Pena flew the airline to quell regulator and consumer fears.

Although such insider investigative journalism makes the book's first half a trenchant read, the rest of it is almost too complete in its restatement of statistics and consumer self-preservation methods. While we certainly should be interested in which airlines have the highest rates of accidents, near-misses and the like, do we really want to read about ``smoke hoods'' designed to protect passengers during in-flight fires?

Schiavo, an experienced flyer who earned her pilot's license at age 18, obviously has a fetish for all things airborne, which explains why she carried so much zeal into her former job and did it so well. Still, it is her utter obsessiveness regarding her subject that may lead the reader to have thoughts such as, ``Well, air travel is still safer than riding in a car,'' or, ``If I'm going, I really don't want to know.''

Thoughts that Schiavo would never want to hear. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Flying Blind, Flying Safe''

Authors: Mary Schiavo With Sabra Chartrand

Publisher: Avon Books. 357 pp.

Price: $25

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