More Step Up To Complain About FAA

"At my facility, a culture of fear exists because of what they have done to me," said Nesbitt, whose complaint was filed in October but helped form the basis of the investigators' request to the FAA to retain records. "It has made my life a wreck."

FAA spokeswoman Lynn Tierney said she could not address the individual allegations by whistle-blowers that have not been made public, yet. But she added that workplace retaliation is an "impediment to a safety culture."

"We strive to create a professional, mission critical atmosphere where people work together and resolve issues," Tierney wrote in an e-mail, adding that the allegations by whistle-blowers "are troubling."

Another FAA employee, Mike Cole, said he filed a whistle-blower complaint because his bosses did not take his safety concerns seriously and then punished him when he reported his worries over an FAA safety hot line.

Cole was worried, he said, about a procedure in which controllers in the tower at an airport in Juneau, Alaska, cleared pilots to take off and then closed their facility for the night. Cole worked in a flight service station that issues weather briefings and files flight plans for pilots, and he was concerned that planes might take off later than scheduled, and their pilots would not know whether other aircraft were heading to the airport. Such an error could result in a collision, he said.

"Juneau Air Traffic Control Tower is playing dodge ball" with the airlines, Cole said.

Several times, Cole said, he stopped pilots from taking off because he learned another plane was about to land. He reported the problems to his bosses but did not get anywhere with it, he said. In December, he filed a complaint with the FAA's safety hot line service.

Shortly after, his boss yelled at him, Cole said, and he was decertified for alleged mental health reasons. In a report explaining his decision to rescind Cole's medical clearance to work, his boss complained that the flight service worker "has become paralyzed by overwhelming paranoia and delusion in which he sees nothing but aviation disaster."

His doctors, however, found no evidence of serious mental disorders and recommended that Cole return to duty. "From a psychiatric point of view, I see no reason why Mr. Cole is not able to resume work," one doctor wrote in a report submitted to the FAA in March.

"I kept bringing up these problems, and they kept saying we didn't have any problems," said Cole, who went back to work the same month.

Farrington, a former FAA inspector in Orlando who oversaw cabin safety at AirTran Airways, said she waited four years to make her allegations of misconduct and retaliation because she thought no one would care.

The former inspector alleges that she raised issues with her bosses about poor training of flight attendants at AirTran and problems related to replica fuselages used to teach flight crews how to exit the back of a Boeing 717 in an emergency. AirTran was using a mock-up of the tail section of a DC-9, not a Boeing 717 replica, to teach flight attendants how to deploy an emergency slide to exit the plane. The two planes are similar, but the tail sections are slightly different. In 2003, the carrier had far more 717s than DC-9s, company records show, and the carrier was aggressively moving to retire its remaining gas-guzzling DC-9s.