Plea for Overhauling the FAA

A blue-ribbon panel finds air-safety agency short on skills

Major plane accidents sometimes seem to be the only way to force reforms in air safety. The crash 14 months ago in Chicago of an American Airlines DC-10, a disaster that killed 273 people when the plane's engine fell off, may be one such case. After six months of study, a blue-ribbon panel of 13 aviation experts headed by George M. Low, NASA's longtime No. 2 man and now president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, last week released a firmly critical 118-page report that could lead to a major overhaul of the Federal Aviation Administration, the Government's principal agency for policing the skies. Its chief conclusion: the FAA, from the standpoint of technical depth and competence, simply is not up to the job of certifying as airworthy new aircraft that will fly 400 people at nearly the speed of sound seven miles above the earth.

The panel's report and 34 recommendations amounted to the most searching judgment on the FAA since it was reorganized 22 years ago to deal with problems and hazards of the commercial jet age. Highlights of the report:

> The FAA's engineering staff, about 370 of whom are occupied with the certification of all new U.S. aircraft, are overwhelmed by the countless considerations that go into designing, building and testing a commercial airliner. In creating the wide-bodied L-1011 jetliner, for example, Lockheed submitted no fewer than 300,000 engineering sketches and 2,000 engineering reports. Says the panel: "FAA engineers cannot review each of the thousands of drawings, calculations, reports and tests, yet the agency must be certain that the design meets all the regulatory requirements."

> The flood of technical documents has long forced the FAA to use the expertise of so-called designated engineering representatives, or DERs; they are actually employees of aircraft manufacturers used by the agency to help in all aspects of the design review process. This is unavoidable, says the report, even though it puts the agency at less than arm's length from the companies it is overseeing, and it recommends continued use of DERs. But it also says that the system breeds "only a cursory review" of the DERs' work and urges that a better way be found to monitor what they approve.

> In the area of aircraft maintenance, the panel suggests that the agency increase its surveillance of airline mechanics, making use of frequent and unannounced inspections at airline maintenance facilities. (Improper handling of the DC-10's engine pylon mounts during routine maintenance caused the damage that led to the calamitous engine loss in Chicago.) The report also recommended that at least for engineering work, there should be a centralized organization with facilities and staff large and attractive enough to lure people of the highest technical competence to the agency's ranks.

The panel was critical of what it considers a lack of continuity in the agency's top leadership--five FAA administrators in ten years, all political appointees. The panel also emphasized that planes should be so designed that nothing short of a mid-air collision or similar catastrophe will cause them to drop from the sky. To that end, it wants aircraft equipped with backup systems, like those aboard the Apollo spacecraft that Chairman Low helped send to the moon.

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