Airline Safety: A Whistleblower's Tale

A new report spotlights how FAA inspectors must battle not only carriers but their own agency, too

by Stanley Holmes

After mechanics at Northwest Airlines went out on strike on Aug. 20, 2005, Federal Aviation Administration safety inspector Mark Lund began to see troubling signs. One replacement mechanic didn't know how to test an engine. Another couldn't close a cabin door. Many did not seem properly trained. In Lund's view, their inexperience resulted in dangerous mistakes. One DC-10, for example, had a broken lavatory duct that allowed human waste to spill onto vital navigation equipment. The leak developed during a flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis. Northwest (NWA) planned to let the plane continue on to Honolulu with the perilous and putrid problem unfixed—until one of Lund's fellow safety inspectors in Minneapolis intervened.

Just two days after the strike began, Lund fired off a "safety recommendation for accident prevention" letter to his supervisors and to FAA headquarters in Washington. It was the loudest alarm he had the authority to ring. Claiming that "a situation exists that jeopardizes life," Lund proposed cutting back on Northwest's flight schedule until mechanics and inspectors could do their job "without error." But instead of taking harsh action against the airline, the agency punished him. On Aug. 29, Lund's supervisors confiscated the badge that gave him access to Northwest's facilities and gave him a desk job. That happened to be the same day the airline sent a letter to the FAA complaining about Lund's allegedly disruptive and unprofessional conduct. The FAA says it treated Lund fairly.

As the airline escalated its war against Lund, he counter­attacked. Going over the heads of multiple layers of FAA managers, Lund faxed his safety recommendation to Mark Dayton, then the Democratic senator for Northwest's home state of Minnesota. Dayton, in turn, brought the matter to the attention of the Inspector General for the Transportation Dept., which oversees the FAA.

In the two years after Lund blew the whistle on the unaddressed problems he perceived at Northwest, he says, the FAA made his life uncomfortable. Now Lund is returning the favor. On Sept. 27, 2007, the Inspector General released a report on the episode that lambasted the FAA for its treatment of Lund, who held on to his job despite what he claims was an effort to fire him. At the request of the Inspector General, the agency is now in the process of modifying the procedures it uses to review safety allegations raised by inspectors. The FAA is bracing for more scrutiny on this issue. In March, the House aviation subcommittee plans to hold a hearing on an alleged incident of retaliation involving an inspector for Southwest Airlines.

The "FAA's handling of [Lund's] safety concerns appeared to focus on discounting the validity of the complaints," the Inspector General's office wrote in its report. "A potential negative consequence of FAA's handling of this safety recommendation is that the other inspectors may be discouraged from bringing safety issues to FAA's attention."

On-the-Ground Cops

Lund's story shines a spotlight on a conflict that most passen­gers have no idea exists: the one between safety inspectors and airlines. The inspectors are the on-the-ground cops who ensure that engines fire up properly, that the wing flaps function, and that all of the other complex machinery in an aircraft is in good working order. They have broad discretion to halt and delay flights—power that often rankles the thinly stretched, financially strapped carriers. When an inspector launches a formal investigation into an apparent safety violation at a passenger airline, something that happened more than 200 times last year, it often triggers costly repairs. And when the bill exceeds $50,000, the FAA must issue a press release alerting the world to the problem.

The airlines sometimes fight back. Executives meet constantly with local FAA officials on a wide variety of issues and occasionally lodge informal complaints against tough inspectors. From time to time, the carriers bring their concerns directly to the agency's top official: the FAA administrator. "If the airline feels uncomfortable, management will call the FAA administrator," says Linda Goodrich, a former inspector who is now vice-president of the Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS) union, which represents inspectors and played no role in Lund's dispute with the agency. "The FAA administrator will immediately demand to know what we are doing to them. You can imagine an inspector trying to do his work when his local management is so fearful of the airline."

Several safety inspectors told BusinessWeek that they had also experienced or witnessed retaliation. (Most of the safety inspectors interviewed by BusinessWeek did not want to be identified by name in this article for that reason.) The House aviation subcommittee is probing an episode in which FAA management allegedly punished an inspector in 2007, according to three sources with knowledge of the subcommittee's probe. Worried that some of the aluminum skins on Southwest's (LUV) older Boeing 737s were prone to cracking, this inspector called for the planes to be rotated out of the fleet until they could all be repaired—a process that would have been time-consuming and costly. He was reassigned though later reinstated in his previous job. A Southwest spokesperson says the airline "is unaware" of the concerns raised by this inspector and "has no knowledge of a probe by the House aviation subcommittee." The FAA declined to comment.