Fly With Confidence: US House Passes Air Safety Bill

This week the US House passed legislation designed to throw some cold water on the love affair between FAA inspectors and the airlines they're supposed to be overseeing.

The bill, which applies a bunch of new rules to the FAA's inspection practices, is a response to inspection lapses uncovered earlier this year. In March it came to light that over 40 Southwest Airlines jets were flying without required safety checks because some FAA inspectors assigned to Southwest weren't enforcing the rules.

As if to prove it was actually on top of its game, the FAA then turned around and ordered a series of seemingly random supplemental inspections, creating a fiasco that saw entire chunks of the nation's air travel system to grind to a halt. American Airlines got hit the hardest -- it grounded nearly 300 planes, cancelled thousands of flights, and says it lost tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

The new air safety bill is supposed to make all of this a sad memory by laying out new rules for the FAA. These include:

• Creating a whistle blowers' office within the FAA so that safety complaints can be investigated and dealt with. Hopefully these complaints can be filed anonymously so inspectors aren't afraid to come forward. 
• A plan to rotate inspectors to new jobs every five years so that none of them get too comfy with any one particular airline.
• A "cooling off" period that requires FAA inspectors to wait two years before taking a gig with one of the airlines that they used to oversee. This would go a long way toward preventing cases of "Hey, you let us fly these planes without an inspection, and we'll get you a nice cushy job over here when you retire."

Kudos to the House for pushing this through (though it still needs Senate approval) and shame on the airlines and the FAA for making a bill like this necessary in the first place. Both Congress and the aviation industry have enough to worry about right now -- obeying the rules shouldn't require new legislation.

Photo by Flick user Franco Folini