Trade Offs
In his February 6, 2000 article, Carey wrote, "Few in the air travel business like to dwell on it, but trade-offs between safety and cost are made every day -- both in the design of airplanes and in their maintenance. And while commercial airlines remain one of the safest forms of travel, those trade-offs were underscored again with the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, a disaster that has been speculatively linked to a faulty horizontal rear stabilizer."

"While according to the NTSB, the root cause of the stabilizer failure has not yet been established, federal officials had warned last year that the device was subject to corrosion and should be inspected. But they gave airlines 18 months to comply with the order. Federal Aviation Administration officials have defended their handling of the corrosion warning, indicating that some airlines asked for even more time. In general, they say they never sacrifice safety for the convenience of the industry. Like many in the risk management business, they run a cost-benefit analysis for everything, but do not allow safety to be compromised under any circumstances."

Mere mortals cannot eliminate risk
The Newspaper article quotes Mitch Barker, at the FAA's Northwest Mountain Office near Seattle: "There's no way, being mere mortals, we can eliminate risk entirely. All we can do is our best, but we don't count the cost when it comes to safety."

Carey wrote, "Mr. C.O. Miller, a veteran of several decades in aviation, much of it as a safety officer and safety consultant, begs to differ. 'This stuff you hear out of Washington is a bunch of -- how do you put it in a family newspaper? Anybody who has been in the business around the world, will admit, yes, you do compromise safety, otherwise you would never get an airplane off the ground, you would never have an air transportation system.' There's no magic line, but there is a rough formula: Ever since the Reagan administration, the Federal Aviation Administration has had to justify its air safety recommendations to the federal Office of Management of the Budget. And OMB does consider costs against benefits. The FAA has a range of choices on how to handle maintenance and design issues, depending on what it judges to be necessary. Depending on how serious it deems a problem, it can ground a fleet immediately or give the airlines months to fix something."

FAA makes reasonable calls
According to Carey, "Many experts think the FAA made a reasonable call last year when it gave airlines 18 months to inspect possible corrosion on the horizontal stabilizer of MD-80 series aircraft. Dennis Moore, managing engineer with Exponent Failure Analysis Associates said, 'Let's say you found corrosion, but the corrosion would have to be three times as bad before you had a safety concern, and the aircraft on which we found the corrosion were inspected two years ago. They'll say, If we make the inspection in 18 months and there's a problem out there it's likely we will catch it. There's a chance you won't, but it's a small chance, and if you weigh that against grounding 1,200 airplanes -- that's a disaster, and it's not warranted.'"

Carey's article continued, "Many times the agency makes the right call. In all fairness, you don't hear about the times it worked out just fine. In a perfect world we'd spend all the money we needed and nobody would ever get a bump or a bruise flying a commercial airliner. But everyone agrees there has to be some way to make a decision about what problems to fix -- and when. And as bizarre as the calculations sometimes seem, there may be no other way to gauge acceptable risk."

For a full copy of Pete Carey's insightful article - Click on this link to the Contra Costa Times. If it has expired, write AcuSafe News.