Texas Coverup Is Latest FAA Black Eye
Controllers' Errors Were Pinned on Pilots

By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 25, 2008

Federal Aviation Administration managers covered up mistakes by air traffic controllers at a Texas facility, making it more difficult for authorities to detect safety hazards in some of the nation's busiest airspace, FAA officials disclosed yesterday.

In revealing the results of a government watchdog investigation, the FAA was also forced to admit that it failed to adequately address similar allegations raised publicly several years ago.

The disclosures come as the FAA has been battered in recent weeks for lax oversight of airline maintenance programs and their compliance with safety mandates. Embarrassed by those revelations, the FAA launched a crackdown on air carriers, resulting in massive groundings of planes and flight cancellations as maintenance workers scrambled to look for potential flaws.

The Texas investigation centered on how supervisors misreported errors at a control center that handles thousands of airplanes arriving and departing daily from airports in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The Transportation Department's inspector general found that managers at the facility were reclassifying errors by controllers as mistakes made by pilots, according to FAA officials. While disclosing the results of the probe, the FAA declined to release the report itself. The inspector general also declined to release the documents.

"The report is disturbing," FAA Acting Administrator Robert Sturgell said in a hasty statement before leaving a news conference without taking any questions. "A higher standard is expected of us."

The errors included instances in which controllers allowed aircraft to get too close to each other and others in which they gave pilots improper or late instructions, FAA officials said. None resulted in crashes, and no further details were provided about the incidents.

FAA officials said the inspector general found that managers misclassified 62 incidents as pilot errors or "non-events" during a 20-month period ending in July 2007. About 25 percent of errors at the facility were found to have been misclassified, FAA officials said.

As laid out by FAA officials, the inspector general's probe confirms the general thrust of allegations made by another government investigator, U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch, in a July report. Bloch, who investigates complaints by federal whistleblowers, said at the time that FAA managers reclassified errors to avoid criticism from their bosses and to enhance their chances of receiving monetary performance bonuses, which are based partly on error rates.

FAA officials yesterday did not discuss potential motives for the misreporting but said they were re-evaluating their bonus system. They also said the report revealed serious problems because such data manipulation could make it difficult to discover trends that could be addressed to prevent accidents.

"If you are going to chase risk in the system, you have to chase it accurately," said Hank Krakowski, chief operating officer of the FAA's air traffic management organization.

Krakowski and other FAA officials said they do not believe similar reporting problems exist at other facilities. The inspector general found that only 3 percent of reports were misclassified in a national sample of such data, FAA officials said.

Still, Krakowski could not guarantee that managers at other air traffic control centers were not playing similar statistical games. "I am not sure I am confident that it can't happen elsewhere," he said in announcing a series of steps designed to thwart such efforts.

Krakowski said that the FAA had removed the manager and assistant manager of the Dallas-Fort Worth facility and placed them in administrative jobs. The FAA has also stepped up audits at that center, he added.

To reduce the chance of managers altering statistics for their own benefit, they will no longer have the authority to assess and assign the causes of errors, FAA officials said. Instead, they said, officials outside a facility's chain of command will be given that responsibility.

Meanwhile, the FAA has launched a "complete review" of how it operates and holds controllers and managers accountable in its air traffic division, Krakowski said, adding that the agency was also deploying computer software that will automatically detect errors by controllers.

However, lawmakers and Bloch said those measures might not be enough to change the FAA's culture. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who had tough questions for FAA officials during an April 10 hearing on oversight of maintenance practices, said that "there isn't anything in this incident that should reassure people that we are managing this agency competently."

Bloch said he worried that the misreporting of errors and recent lapses in FAA oversight of airline maintenance are "part and parcel of a culture of complacency and coverup."

The special counsel also questioned the FAA's commitment to fixing its reporting issues, noting that nearly identical allegations were raised by the same whistleblower at the same facility in 2004.

In the earlier instance, the whistleblower -- a controller -- alleged that managers were improperly investigating and underreporting operational errors. By 2005, the Department of Transportation's inspector general had determined that the allegations were true and that the facility's managers had been underreporting mistakes for seven years.

The FAA pledged to take steps to address the problems. It removed one manager, placed others on "performance improvement plans," retrained controllers and launched a nationwide audit to ensure such problems are not widespread, according to the inspector general.

But it appears some of those actions were not completed or fell far short of their goals.

"We failed as an organization," Krakowski said. "We were supposed to go down there and monitor and audit and do quality assurance on what was going on down there. It is clear to us that that was not taken seriously by some of those people who were charged with that."

The air traffic controller who exposed the 2004 situation and the most recent incidents said that she remains frustrated by the pace of change at the FAA. She also said she was skeptical that anything will change.

"They have to regenerate faith in me and a lot of people," the controller, Anne Whiteman, said in an interview. "I may be the most vocal, but people have lost faith in the system and the FAA."