MARION BLAKEY may become the first chief of the Federal Aviation Administration to have to reply to official letters she wrote herself. In less than a year in her previous job as chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates air crashes, she sent 74 major suggestions for making air travel safer to the head of the FAA, which regulates US aviation. By the time Blakey left the NTSB in September to head up the FAA, not one of the 74 items had been implemented, although some are presumably moving through the FAA’s labyrinthine pipeline.
Will air travel become safer as a result of Blakey’s appointment? Let’s hope so. The FAA alone has the power to make safety rules, and it eventually heeds more than 80 per cent of the NTSB’s suggestions, albeit frequently years later. This is not to say that it does not often act, sometimes admirably so, on its own initiative. But many lives could be saved if it adopted even more of these recommendations and faster.
For years there has been considerable tension between the two bodies. The NTSB has often blamed the FAA for contributing to fatal accidents. For example, last month a leaked NTSB report stated that the FAA contributed to the crash of an Alaska Air MD-80 off the coast of California in January 2000 in which 88 people died. A tail part had failed due to poor lubrication; earlier the FAA had allowed Alaska Air to reduce the frequency with which it serviced the component.
Similarly, an NTSB report implicated the FAA in the crash of a Korean Air Boeing 747 ...