FAA takes safety action

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration is going to begin alerting its top headquarters officials when field inspectors miss airline safety inspections, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said Friday.

Peters also demanded that the FAA and American Airlines explain to her within 14 days why 250,000 U.S. air travelers endured canceled flights last week. American grounded its MD-80 jetliners and canceled 3,100 flights in order to inspect or redo wiring that was supposed to have been completed between Sept. 5, 2006, and March 5.

"No one at all was well served by what happened last week," Peters told a news conference outside FAA headquarters.

She said she didn't think federal regulators had overreacted in the wake of revelations about the FAA's lax supervision of Southwest Airlines. Last month, it was revealed that the FAA allowed Southwest to fly dozens of Boeing 737s without inspecting them as required for fuselage cracks and that Southwest's system for complying with FAA safety directives had not been inspected by the FAA since 1999.

But Peters wanted to know "why so many aircraft had to be grounded and so many travelers had to be inconvenienced," in order to "help us avoid similar disruptions" as the FAA completes an audit of all major airlines' compliance with safety directives. The audit was ordered after the Southwest debacle came to light and helped uncover the MD-80 wiring problems.

Flanked by acting FAA administrator Bobby Sturgell, Peters announced a series of steps to improve safety in a system she insisted was already the safest in history:

• The FAA is setting up a national safety inspection review team to examine airlines for problems mostly likely to occur and in a comprehensive way.

• The FAA will begin requiring senior field-office officials to sign off on voluntary safety disclosures by airlines. These voluntary disclosures must show the immediate problem has been fixed and steps have been taken to ensure it won't recur. In return, the airlines will avoid penalties for the safety problems.

• The FAA general counsel and Transportation officials will begin meeting with airlines to be sure they have plans for accommodating passengers if there are future mass aircraft groundings.

• Peters named five outside aviation and safety experts to recommend improvements for the whole system within 120 days.