Friction Escalates in Air Crash Probe
How convenient - A pedestrian crossing (kommentar Per Gram)
By ANDY PASZTOR
Friction between federal aviation
regulators and crash investigators threatens to impede a probe into a Southwest
Airlines Inc. landing accident last month in New York, according to the
carrier's safety officials.
The July 22 accident at LaGuardia Airport,
which resulted in more than a handful of injuries but no fatalities, underscores
growing tension between experts at the National Transportation Safety Board,
responsible for uncovering the causes of accidents, and regulators at the
Federal Aviation Administration interested in swiftly punishing pilots or
bringing civil-enforcement actions against airlines in the wake of a
crash.That inherent conflict is now exacerbated, according to industry
and government-safety experts, by the growing importance of social media in
disseminating air-safety information. As a result, many airline officials
increasingly feel trapped between competing demands for ever faster releases of
information, coming from passengers as well as different parts of the government
and even their own top executives.
Escalating public pressure for nearly
instantaneous details about airliner incidents and accidents has shaken up the
previously staid, traditional world of accident investigations. The safety
board's leaders increasingly are turning to Twitter to rush out details of
significant findings-sometimes before advising on-site investigators of
impending messages.
Those unconventional announcements in turn are
prompting the FAA and industry players to speed up their internal investigations
and responses.
The LaGuardia situation "is a good example of the
multitude of information requests that come into the airline" after a typical
crash or major incident, according to Timothy Logan, Southwest's senior
risk-management official. Even before investigators from the safety board had
completed their preliminary inquiry, he said, regulators from a number of
different offices within the FAA already were seeking some of the same
information from the carrier.
"I'm not sure it serves anybody's purpose,"
said Mr. Logan, because it wasn't coordinated properly and in any event, "the
safety investigation should take precedence." FAA officials helping the NTSB on
investigations are prohibited from working on potential enforcement
cases.
About a week after the LaGuardia accident, Mr. Logan told an
international safety conference last week in Vancouver, British Columbia, one
part of the agency asked Southwest for information related to the plane's "black
boxes," or onboard data and voice recorders.
"I haven't even seen it yet,
how am I going to give it to you?" he recalled responding. The FAA is barred
from using cockpit-voice recordings for enforcement.
"We're in the
middle" of the tussle, Mr. Logan told the conference, because there is "certain
information we're told we can't provide" to the FAA.
Calling the
situation "very frustrating," he said "we need to get this worked out" to avoid
broader delays and complications that could affect investigations of many other
commercial-aviation accidents.
"We have four different parts of the
agency coming at us" at the same time, Mr. Logan told a handful of attendees at
the conference after his prepared remarks.
Pilot-union leaders at
Southwest have privately expressed the same general complaints to the FAA,
according to people familiar with the details.
Ten of the 149 people
aboard the Southwest Boeing 737 were injured when the plane landed on its front
wheels at LaGuardia, causing the nose gear to collapse and substantially
damaging other parts of the aircraft. The high-profile accident temporarily
closed the busy runway.
The captain of Southwest Flight 345, arriving
from Nashville, took the unusual step of taking over the controls during the
last 400 feet of the descent, and investigators are now trying to determine if
she throttled back the engines prematurely. The plane switched to a nose-down
position in the final four seconds of flight.
The NTSB has said it found
no airplane malfunctions that could have caused the botched landing, though
investigators haven't yet disclosed their conclusions.
The FAA said it is
"supporting the NTSB and examining our areas of responsibility to determine if
any near-term action is necessary to ensure safe operations," but a spokeswoman
declined to elaborate. Also on Sunday, a Southwest spokeswoman declined to
comment on the specifics of the probe but said its quality hasn't been
hurt.
In an email response, an NTSB spokesman said the board relies on
social media since many journalists use Twitter because "it is instantaneous and
often meets their deadlines." The statement called it a valuable tool "to inform
the media and the general public about the status of accident
investigations."
The Southwest probe highlights the dramatic procedural
and attitude changes already embraced by Southwest's safety team in this new
era.
Dennis Post, the airline's senior accident investigator, told the
same Vancouver conference that the prevalence of Twitter and videos taken by
passengers using cellphones has drastically altered the way Southwest begins
examining in-flight emergencies.
"Our passengers are our first
investigators," Mr. Post said, calling them "on-scene reporters" eager to share
information about all types of events.
Every day, he added, "we have
teams pulling everything we can off social media" in order to create a novel
warning system about unusual events throughout Southwest's nationwide
network.
In the event of a crash, Mr. Logan said aircraft makers and many
other airlines resort to the same Internet-savvy tactics.
But he worries
that the resulting flurry of tweets and videos could end up confusing, rather
than enlightening, most people.
"The last thing we need is a [public
relations] war in the midst of a significant event," he told accident
investigators last week.
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The combined voice and flight data recorder from the AS332 L2 Super Puma helicopter has been successfully recovered and will be transported to the AAIB HQ in Farnborough later today. 
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