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Top House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Democrats Tuesday accused FAA officials of giving "inaccurate and misleading" testimony during a hearing last Thursday on lax aviation safety oversight by the agency.

Democrats are targeting testimony of three FAA officials regarding whether agency safety inspectors and managers were ordered "to conduct special meetings with all airlines, repair stations and other regulated entities to deliver and discuss" new procedures for appealing actions by safety inspectors, according to a letter from Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Costello, D-Ill., and Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chairman Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. They are specifically targeting assertions by the FAA officials that agency managers and inspectors had up to one year to deliver these new procedures to airlines and others regulated by the agency.

"This relaxed approach is radically different" than a February 2004 FAA memorandum directing that meetings were to be conducted within two months, the Democrats wrote to FAA Associate Administrator for Aviation Safety Nicholas Sabatini; James Ballough, director of the agency's flight standards service; and Thomas Stuckey, who oversaw FAA safety inspections at Southwest Airlines.

Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and acting FAA Administrator Robert Sturgell were sent copies.

COMMENTS

• While I may actually agree with Skeeter for once, (ref. “The Senate has made it policy that lying under oath”), please believe that is only a partial truth. While I will not deny the Senate has fabricated a more than a few foibles; they sure seemed to hold Slick Willie’s feet to the fire over what many considered more an act of stupidity than a national treason. And if “inaccuracy generation” were measured in search of a gold standard; then I know of few to compare with the current POTUS. Tip off Posted April 10, 2008 4:33 PM
• The Senate has made it policy that lying under oath is not a crime, so what's the issue here ?? Dan ketter Posted April 9, 2008 11:12 PM
• "Let's get real, here." Yes, let's. Facing reality has been pretty rare in the past few years. "This latest attack by Oberstar is irrelevant to the current Southwest case." True. It's about American and Delta and Alaska, too. It's about FAA oversight in general. "This letter is about airline appeals to actions taken against them, not about the actual problem, which was a first-line supoervisor directing line inspectors NOT to take action against Southwest." If the Southwest incident were an isolated case, as FAA management tried to tell Oberstar, that might be true. Southwest obviously was NOT an isolated incident. American, Delta, and Alaska don't cancel flight for fun. It's too expensive. And in the Southwest case, FAA management ignored the whistleblowers' hotline complaints for years, but when Southwest filed an anonymous! complaint about the inspectors, the inspectors were immediately reassigned. And then FAA Management tried to tell the committee that the inspector who had stopped the investigation had been removed from all safety related duties. Not five minutes later, they admitted that he'd conducted three enroute inspections during the time he was supposed to be "counting paper clips". Tomorrow's Senate hearing ought to be pretty ugly. Emmanuel Goldstein Posted April 9, 2008 9:49 PM