Hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development and Related Agencies Subcommittte/Subject: FAA Safety and Modernization Performance

SEN. KIT BOND (R-MO): Thank you very much, Madame Chair.

And thank you, Mr. Sturgell, for your continued service to the nation at the FAA. I also welcome Inspector General Scovel. I thank the chair for the opportunity to address these important safety issues and modernization issues at the FAA.

Mr. Administrator, first, I echo the chair's deep concern about the state of Aviation Safety office within the FAA. I am, however, appreciative of the current safety record of your administration and believe you and your employees are owed a huge thank-you from the entire flying public for the accomplishments so far.

I think the current safety record commends itself, with zero fatal accidents last year and a fatal accident rate of .022 percent, just over two-hundreds of a percent, per 100,000 departures over the past three years. We're seeing that this is an extremely safe period for air travel.

But merely good is not good enough when you are in the flying public. We want to see 100 percent. It's now evident there were clearly practices within your AVS office that exposed passengers to risks over the past few years. And, as indicated, the recent Southwest episode and the American Airlines wiring situation raise a number of questions that I hope you'll address.

Let me be clear. I believe the FAA, regardless of any customer service initiative or any other program, should regulate the aviation industry without second thought about hurting the balance sheets or feelings of any air carrier certificate-holder where safety is an issue.

The FAA can and should do a better job of physically inspecting aircraft to ensure compliance after new airworthiness directed -- a directive is implied to verify compliance. Merely assuming an airline is in compliance or relying on an airline's own maintenance logs is simply not enough -- as has been proven over the past several weeks.

I believe the use of targeted, random selections -- selected inspections will allow you to determine whether the job is being done and make sure you call out immediately any areas where there are deficiencies, and not just waiting for a five-year general review. I believe these inspections should be made immediately and on an ongoing basis with the available inspectors.

I applaud many of your recent actions to reform the inspection program, such as working with manufacturers and airlines to clarify airworthiness directives to provide more plain language directives; and tough office audits to ensure that collaboration between certificate holders and inspectors is transparent and that it's not too, quote, "familiar", closed quotes.

I remain concerned that senior managers at certificate management offices are allowed to stay in place with one carrier indefinitely without rotation. By limiting the time these senior professionals could stay at one location, it seems to me, you could avoid any instances or appearances of impropriety.

While I'm concerned about the problems with airline maintenance compliance, there are still many issues facing the FAA's procurement accounts. The committee has been concerned about the air surface detection equipment -- Model X or ASDE-X program -- for several years. And I'm glad to see the program is not experiencing further schedule slippages and the final schedule for completion is moving in the right direction. This critical safety technology is far too important to be delayed. I'm concerned, however, that recent decisions in expediting ASDE-X may be impacting the capital budget procurements, as well as the overall costs of the program.

In the area of runway safety, I'm encouraged by recent news of the decision to expedite from 2014 to 2011 the runway safety lights program. Mr. Sturgell, for many years the FAA has needed a capability to warn pilots directly of potential runway incursions.

The NTSB has written about FAA's deficiencies in this area in great detail for many years. Runway status lights could reach airports even sooner with increased investments, but your budget proposal only provides for a modest increase in the program, while providing a massive increase for NextGen funding. Finding the appropriate balance is not easy, but it's not impossible either. Safety programs that have an immediate impact -- for example, in the area of runway incursions -- should receive priority.

And I hope to work with you, Madame Chair, to move this program forward. In fact, runway status lights are a great example of competing programs within your capital budget that need serious investment and oversight -- all while the system is being modernized with increased spending for NextGen.

The administration requests over $600 million for the NextGen -- the new NextGen modernization technologies for fiscal year '09. And while I agree that something must be done to modernize the current decrepit system, we cannot neglect maintaining the current system and adding long over due safety improvement that are of relatively simple, technical and monetary costs. I think a balance is needed to preserve the current system while we implement the needed changes that are part of FutureGen.

And while we're on the topic of NextGen, I'm concerned about the future of our air traffic system. While delays last year were the worst on record, the prognostications I see indicate that this summer could be even worse. And if you line up the rhetoric regarding the benefits of NextGen, next to the forecast for passenger and operational growth, there doesn't seem to be any relief any time soon coming.

I'm alarmed to find that none of the planning documents for overall NextGen or any of the specific budget documents for the component programs contain any mention of how each NextGen capability will reduce delays and increase capacity in anything other than generalities. If the entire goal of NextGen is to expand capacity threefold compared to current levels, why can't you consider the benefits each new expensive program will have on the overall progress towards meeting our goals in specific estimations?

It seems to me that a lot of investment decisions and calculations rely a lot on luck and hope -- two things that really have no place in federal procurement -- especially when related to costly technical systems. Simply knowing that we need three times the current capacity, without a current plan that's concrete that tells us how each investment will get us to the target goal, is not going to help us avoid delays, cost escalations and procurements and schedule slippages. We need to see actually figures and estimations to make our funding decisions -- not generalities.

And while I express concerns regarding the FAA, I reiterate my support for you, Mr. Sturgell. Your experience and approach to this position are uniquely suited to provide the type of leadership that we believe is going to be needed in the modernization challenges ahead. I know the prospects of your confirmation are somewhat in question, but I have no doubt that you'd be a fine administrator at the FAA.

The challenges before us are great. They are not unsolvable. We need good leadership.

I thank you, Madame Chair.

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SEN. BOND: Thank you, Madame Chair.

Let me follow up on the airworthiness directives. It appears to me that you are assuming, and in most cases with justification, that the ADs are being complied with by the airlines. But when a new airworthiness directive is issued, I'm interested in what your agency does.

And I raised in my opening remarks the possibility that there should be random inspections, not system-wide inspections but random inspections, in all carriers when the airworthiness directive has been issued and it goes into effect. And I understand this wiring directive did not come into effect until early March this year. But when it comes into effect, why do you not -- should you do random checks to ensure that the paper reports and the assurances of compliance of airlines are, in fact, being accomplished?

MR. STURGELL: Senator Bond, as part of our regular oversight program, our inspectors do conduct random checks of ADs, generally over a -- you know, there's a requirement over a specified period of time to do that.

In the case of this wiring AD, some of the things that we have learned, the process involves an airworthiness directive, service bulletin, an engineering change order, and then eventually ends up at a maintenance work card. And the airline mechanic has the work cards, and those are the instructions they go to work on the airplane to meet the requirements of the airworthiness directives. And the airworthiness directives and the documents are generally engineering documents, and they're very complicated.

So we're seeing issues of translation, of human factors, and similar types of issues in this review. And one of the things we are doing is we're going to sit down with Boeing and the manufacturers and the industry and to figure out if we can improve and how to improve upon this process.

SEN. BOND: Well, it seems to me that it doesn't do much good. You can have the best engineering document in the world, and if the guy or the gal who is actually doing the work can't understand it -- I mean, somebody from your shop ought to be looking at this, maybe in conjunction with representatives of the mechanics, saying, "Number one, do you understand it? Number two, are you doing it?" and then focus your attention in the short term to make sure that when the deadline for completing these ADs arrives, that they have been adequately observed. I would think that kind of check would be important.

Let me ask Mr. Scovel his comments and then you, Mr. Sturgell.

MR. SCOVEL: Good morning again, Senator Bond. I would agree with you certainly that random audits ought to be a part of it. And my understanding is that, to some extent, random audits already are a part of FAA's inspection process.

Another aspect that I would highlight for the committee's attention would be the ATOS system, which is FAA's risk-based and data-driven carrier oversight system. We know from the Southwest case that the carrier's AD compliance program was first audited, first inspected by FAA in 1999. It should be required -- a reinspection should have been done within five years after that date, by 2004.

As of March 2007, when the incidents occurred at Southwest, the carrier's AD compliance program still had not been inspected, some seven years after that date. A follow-on point for FAA ought to be not only random audits, in compliance with -- to test compliance with individual ADs, but making sure that their certificate management officers bird-dog each carrier's AD compliance program on at least the five-year basis that's currently required by the ATOS system. That wasn't done in Southwest. Had it been done, perhaps the March 2007 incidents might have been headed off.

SEN. BOND: Mr. Sturgell, two questions; number one, to respond to the question I asked Mr. Sturgell about random audits when an AD goes into effect. And the second one was, were there any random audits conducted during the 18-month period that the AD was pending to see that the job was being done prior to the effective date to ensure that airlines could meet the goal of compliance by March 2008?

MR. STURGELL: Senator Bond, just going back to the Southwest Airlines incident first, I just want to be very clear. I'm not making any excuses for what happened on behalf of the FAA at that office. It was not appropriate. We're going to take action and we're going to fix it.

To your questions about airworthiness directives, the kinds of questions you're asking are the kinds of questions that our task force with industry will address. During that 18-month compliance period, no, I'm not aware that we went out and checked to see, because compliance is not required until March 5th. That is a question, though, that several people have raised. Is there a way to, you know, during that time frame, quote, "check up" and see if the work being performed is appropriate or not?

So those are questions we're going to address. I would just caution that my worry would be not to let the FAA become the quality control outfit for each individual airline. I want the airlines to have that capability. I want them to be quality-controlling their work.

SEN. BOND: I agree with you on that point. But obviously there are times when their quality assurance program has not worked. That's why I suggested it.

On Southwest, quickly, one of the IG's recommendations was to rotate the senior certificate management office personnel. Do you agree with that approach? Or if that's not the right approach, do you have another approach?

MR. STURGELL: I'll just tell you, my initial concerns with that type of an approach go to the funding that would be required to uproot and relocate people and not just our inspectors, but it would be their families with them and folks out of school and everything like that. I mean, in effect, what we're talking about is a military type of rotation.

The other thing that is a concern would be the loss of corporate knowledge about that particular airline. If an inspector has been there and knows that system, I think that inspector can provide more effective oversight. You know, the system depends on people, and it depends on people doing the right thing. This is, you know, a recommendation that I'm going to continue to talk to the IG about and see if there is some way to address what is being asked. And those are just my initial concerns from it.

SEN. BOND: Thank you, Mr. Administrator.

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