The Middle Seat: Who's Inspecting Your Airplane?; Carriers Now Outsource More of Their Maintenance, But FAA Supervision Is Lax
AIRLINES ARE INCREASINGLY paying other companies to do their maintenance for them. But it has become painfully clear that the Federal Aviation Administration doesn't spend enough time checking up on these outside repair shops.</br></br>Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board cited sloppy maintenance and lax federal oversight as contributors to last year's fatal crash of a US Airways commuter flight in Charlotte, N.C., operated by Air Midwest. It's not the first time: The safety board has also said federal maintenance oversight was an issue in the 2000 Alaska Airlines crash off the coast of California, which killed 88 people.</br></br>Aircraft maintenance matters -- a lot. And while great safety strides have been made in many areas of aviation, the recent track record of maintenance oversight is a troubling one for travelers.</br></br>In an effort to hold down costs, airlines now spend an average of 30% of their maintenance dollars at outside vendors. But the FAA has done little to keep tabs on all this work, according to a report last summer from the Department of Transportation's inspector general. Some 97% of inspections done by FAA officials who oversee specific airlines were of the carriers' in-house maintenance shops -- not third-party facilities -- in fiscal year 2002, the report said. While regional inspectors (as opposed to airline-specific staff) do get out to see more of the independent shops, they often have time for only cursory looks, the report said.</br></br>Overall last year, the FAA says 16% of all its maintenance "surveillance activities" -- anytime an inspector looked at something -- were done at outside repair stations.