Still waiting for air safety improvements

Change comes slowly, very slowly, in Washington. Shortly after the Colgan Air crash near Buffalo in February 2009, Transporation Secretary Ray LaHood and incoming Federal Aviation Administration chief Randy Babbitt promised swift action to remedy the likely culprits: pilot error, fatigue and inadequate training.

The safety board’s final report wasn’t in, but LaHood said his agency wasn’t going to be “just sitting on our hands for seven months waiting for the report to be finished.”

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Archive

• E-mail
• RSS

Babbitt, facing a very unhappy — and very bipartisan — Senate Commerce Committee, pledged “Safety will be my number one priority” and told Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that he would implement the safety board’s recommendations.

That was 2¹ / ₂ years ago. And, despite constant pleas for action from the families of the 50 people killed in the crash, some new procedures have not been implemented. The FAA and the Transportation Department have sent to the Office of Management and Budget proposed rules on pilot fatigue and pilot qualifications and have been awaiting OMB approval. The FAA and DOT are also wrapping up work on a new pilot-training rule.

The airlines, especially the small carriers and others that fly under contract to the military, last month continued to oppose the pilot-fatigue rule, which would require substantial changes in flight crews’ hours, saying the “ill-conceived regulation” would kill as many as 400,000 jobs “at a time when unemployment persists above 9 percent.”

Could be a while longer before anything changes.

Don’t call us

When it comes to the Department of Homeland Security, not everything about public affairs is actually, well, public, our colleague Emily Heil reports.

Take the strange recent case of a Federal Times reporter who, frustrated with his inability to reach the public affairs folks at the department, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get their direct telephone numbers.

In response to the inquiry, the DHS provided a list of staff names and numbers in the Office of Public Affairs — only the numbers were blacked out.

Federal Times reporter Andrew Medici, who chronicled the caper last week on the newspaper’s FedLine blog, tells us he had tired of being told to channel his requests through the generic mediainquiry@dhs.gov e-mail address. Medici said that when he used that address, he never knew who would will be calling him back, when that might happen — or even whether there would be a call at all.

Hence the FOIA request.

In its reply, the DHS explained that it had blacked out the names under an exemption that protects “personal privacy.” (Who knew taxpayer-funded phones were private?)

DHS spokesman Matt Chandler notes that career workers in the department’s FOIA office, not the public affairs shop, make decisions about what information to provide — and what to redact — under such requests. And he insists that reaching members of the media team isn’t all that hard. “We work every day to be fair, transparent and accessible in our dealings with the press,” he says.