Read the whole sordid tale of the Southwest inspection lapse and you will discover a troubling reality within our national air traffic safety infrastructure. For whatever Southwest did or did not do, and however fair or unfair you believe the penalty to be, it pales into insignificance compared to what is now known about the FAA's lack of transparency and meticulousness.
According the the Wall Street Journal there has been a huge history of FAA leadership stifling subordinates' reports of problems. It was bad enough when the whistle-blowers at Enron were thwarted and shut up, but when we are dealing with a Federal agency charged with airplane safety it becomes more than just an economic issue.
One of the main tenets of being Principle-Powered is the quest for violations of values that can be discovered as a way to improve performance, ethics, operations and value production. To do that, there needs to be more than a mere openness for subordinates to report issues--there needs to be an active, cultural DEMAND for that input.
The fact that the middle managers within the FAA were told by their bosses "not to worry about it", or were simply poo-pooed (or completely lied to or ignored) points to a profound negligence in exercising the mission with which the agency is charged. This revelation of crone-ism and deliberate avoidance of issues makes me wonder what else they have suppressed and whether I should worry about it next time I fly. While flying still remains the statistically safest form of transportation, it wouldn't take an awful lot of crashes to reverse that statistic. Also, the fear that these revelations have catalyzed in the flying public certainly isn't helping our stagnant economy.
Maybe Congress ought to conduct hearings about this instead of wasting our national time and budget on dealing with baseball players and steroids. Your thoughts?
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