FAA panel finds ‘disconnect’ on safety at Boeing, with workers fearing retaliation
Published: Feb. 26, 2024 at 6:38 p.m. ET
FAA panel finds ‘disconnect’ on safety at Boeing, with workers fearing retaliation
"And by the way, where the hell is the FAA? FAA had no presence in the factory. And it really irritates you because right down the road, literally 20 minutes down the road, is the Northwest headquarters for the FAA. There’s over 2,000 employees that work at that site and yet, in the busiest factory in the world 20 minutes down the road, there’s four or five employees.That’s not enough to monitor the restaurant operations at the site...........................................................................
What’s going wrong is that nothing changed. They made very superficial changes that they made a big deal of. They made a giant deal of hiring a safety officer. Big whoop. They wanted to deflect attention away."
You never can have enough "inspectors" to watch everything in the airline industry.
That's why integrity in construction and maintenance personnel (mechanics) are so important. (Professionalism)
And then there is the issue of turning a blind eye for ......um expediency. (P word)
"Outsourcing" work in aviation to people and places that are not safe to save money is not a good idea.
Not 18 years ago and not now.
Deja vu.
FAA Inspector Receives Award for His Efforts to Elevate Safety Concerns at Northwest Airlines
BOSTON, MA –
July 16, 2008 - Mark Lund, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) aviation safety inspector and Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS) member who uncovered serious safety issues during the
August 2005 aircraft mechanics strike at Northwest Airlines, was
honored today by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). When the FAA failed to address his safety concerns and instead became more interested with discrediting him as an inspector, Lund enlisted the aid of former Sen. Mark Dayton, who helped to engage the Inspector General (IG) to conduct an independent review of Lund’s concerns and possible mistreatment by the FAA. In October 2007, the IG validated Lund’s concerns and admonished the FAA for its treatment of him during this time. The IG report concluded that the FAA needed improved internal procedures to ensure that “comprehensive, independent investigations of safety allegations and recommendations are consistently performed.”
Fighting For Airline Safety
September/October 2008
By Dick Carozza
Mark Lund just wants to do his job. As a safety inspector for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, he's assigned to spot potential problems. After he reported safety concerns during an airliner's mechanics' strike, he was relegated to a desk job. But eventually an FAA inspector general's report vindicated him. Read how he and other safety inspectors try to be the "eyes and ears" of the flying public.
Mark Lund was concerned. Northwest Airlines' mechanics had gone on strike Aug. 20, 2005, and the airline had replaced them with substitute employees and managers. Lund, a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector in Bloomington, Minn., saw some problems.
A line maintenance manager couldn't find the right switches to test the engines on an Airbus A320. He admitted he had never performed this test on an operating A320 and only recently had been trained on a simulator.
A replacement mechanic was unsure how to close the passenger entry door on a Boeing B757. Another failed to lock the brakes on a jet before checking its brake wear pins.
A DC10 aircraft arrived from Amsterdam with a defective lavatory, which spilled human waste onto vital navigation equipment. Northwest Airlines planned to let the flight continue to Honolulu with the contamination and without fixing the problem until another FAA safety inspector intervened.
Two days after the strike, Lund sent a "safety recommendation for accident prevention" memo, a routine procedure for reporting safety deficiencies, to his supervisors and to FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
He claimed that a "situation exists that jeopardizes life" and recommended that Northwest cut back on its flight schedule until mechanics and inspectors could do their jobs "without error."
Instead of mitigating the public safety risks exhibited at Northwest Airlines, the FAA confiscated Lund's badge that gave him access to Northwest's facilities and confined him to a desk job. Lund then hand-delivered his safety recommendation to Mark Dayton, then the Democratic senator for Northwest's home state of Minnesota. Dayton sent the memo to the inspector general (IG) for the Department of Transportation (DOT), which oversees the FAA.
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