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Airlines, Pilots Say Safety Plan in Jeopardy
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Representatives of Comair, which is seeking to reverse the ruling, declined to comment. Lawyers for the families did not respond to voice-mail messages.
In legal filings, the FAA said it would prefer that the incident reports not be "subject to broad use in litigation." Its lawyers wrote that regulators thought that employees would be less likely to provide information if the reports were not kept confidential. A spokeswoman for the FAA declined to comment about the case.
The Air Transport Association, a District-based trade group that represents many major airlines, and Southwest Airlines became so concerned about the ruling's potential impact that they filed motions last week urging the judge to reconsider.
"Quite simply, if airline industry personnel know that filing an ASAP report has the potential to embroil them in civil litigation, they will be much less likely to report potential safety problems," Southwest's lawyers wrote.
Southwest said its pilots filed 2,973 reports in 2006. Nearly all -- 2,920 -- were "sole-source" statements, meaning that regulators and the carrier learned about the incidents only from the pilots, the carrier's attorneys said.
The loss of such reports "could deprive the airline industry of key safety information," its lawyers argued.
Staff researcher Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
