More Inspectors Needed to Ensure Supervision of Designees
- Details
- Published: July 18, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC—Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued an important report about aviation safety. Specifically, the report examines the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) management of “designees” used to perform inspection and certification functions on commercial passenger aircraft.
Tom Brantley, national president of the Professional Airways Systems Specialists, AFL-CIO (PASS),responded to the report’s findings:
“PASS has been concerned about oversight of FAA designees for many years. Yesterday’s report by the GAO confirms our worries. PASS continues to believe that the shortage of qualified FAA inspectors and the over reliance on poorly supervised designees poses a threat to the safe operation of our aviation system.
“The FAA uses the designee program as a bureaucratic band-aid to compensate for an increasing workload. PASS will press Congress next year to support the immediate hiring of more inspectors in order to improve the FAA’s oversight of the designee program.
“The safety of the flying public is the number one concern of PASS members. For that reason, we are encouraged that the GAO has found that improvements can and should be made in the way the FAA manages the designees that perform vital aviation safety functions. We echo the GAO’s concerns and recommend that its suggestions be seriously considered by Congress and the FAA.
“PASS members look forward to working with Congress and the FAA to seek solutions to the challenges raised in the GAO report and to ensure that everything that can be done is being done to keep our aviation system the safest in the world.”
The GAO report can be found at http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-40.
###
PASS represents more than 11,000 employees of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense who install, maintain, support and certify air traffic control and national defense equipment, inspect and oversee the commercial and general aviation industries, develop flight procedures and perform quality analyses of the aviation systems. For more information, visit the PASS website at www.passnational.org.