FLYING INTO TROUBLE

(14 of 16)

I knew I could no longer stay in my job. once again, the FAA was manipulating a potential public relations crisis without a thought for the safety issues involved. The Secretary of Transportation's office was assisting the cover-up by insisting the report should be classified, even though the classifiers had already approved it for release. They didn't really care that the airport-security report wouldn't qualify for classification; it would take weeks to figure that out, and by then the Olympics would be over, the goal accomplished, the crisis past.

If I expected change, I knew I had to devise yet another strategy to circumvent the FAA, to find a way to offer my concerns about safety and security directly to the public. I had to resign, even though it meant leaving the airport-security report behind and unprotected. The dot was adrift, blown wherever the winds of a media event or crisis carried it. The Secretary offered no leadership, no knowledge or understanding, no accountability. The administrator of the FAA was a figurehead. Neither of them heeded NTSB recommendations; neither followed through on the many reports detailing safety problems at the FAA. Looking around the table at the meeting on the security report, I'd felt painfully defeated for the first time. I couldn't continue working in a place where all we did was sit around waiting for people to die.

On July 3, I wrote my letter of resignation but because of the long holiday weekend, I could not find anyone at the White House to take the letter until July 8. A week later, the House Subcommittee on Aviation asked me to explain why I was leaving my job. Transportation Secretary Pena and administrator Hinson were there too, and they seemed determined to distance themselves from any responsibility for the problems at the FAA that I complained about. The Inspector General had never warned him about ValuJet, Pena told the Senators. He had no knowledge, he insisted, of how deep the crisis ran at the discounter, and he found it very troubling that I had implied that alarm bells should have been ringing all over the dot for months.

It was this kind of revisionist pabulum that had driven me from my job. I explained to the panel that months before, the Secretary's own chief of staff, Ann Bormolini, had at the request of her close personal friend, a ValuJet lobbyist, asked me what I was doing snooping into ValuJet. I told the Senators that in response to this unusual request, I'd written a stern memo outlining what the FAA and my office were doing about ValuJet. Did Pena expect us to believe he had no idea what his chief of staff did every day in the office suite they shared?