FLYING INTO TROUBLE

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Curious and incredulous at the macabre implications, I frequently asked about these elusive valuations and talked to many people who had heard about them or knew someone who knew someone who had heard about them. Yet I never met anyone who had actually seen the official figures, much less helped compile them. In many meetings, FAA officials argued as if they had those figures on the tips of their tongues--"losses," they would explain patiently, from the small number of crashes and even smaller number of attacks on planes just did not justify vast airline investments in safety and security. After all, as the FAA's associate administrator for civil-aviation security, Cathal Flynn, would tell me, the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, cost $1 billion. Trying to prevent another Pan Am 103 would cost $5 billion over 10 years. Couldn't I understand? The numbers just didn't add up.

"We regulate by counting tombstones," an FAA official told a journalist a few years ago. The nickname's origins are unknown, but by the time I joined the Department of Transportation, even people who worked for the FAA cynically called it the Tombstone Agency. Within the Washington Beltway, agency officials, government bureaucrats, staff on Capitol Hill, aviation lobbyists, airline representatives and journalists all understood the poignant irony of this nickname. The FAA will not do anything until people die. It was a sad, bad, inside joke. Only the public never knew how much truth was in it.

I had leaped at the chance to be Inspector General because the job combined the four things I loved most: investigations, law, aviation and public service. Truthfully, the office was tailor-made for me, and I was happy to quit my post as Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of keeping union elections honest. Everyone encouraged me to take the Inspector General job--but only if I intended to do something with it.

In August 1990, I walked into Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole's office. Dressed in slacks, wearing her glasses, Dole was hard at work on a hot Sunday afternoon. The building was quiet--in fact, the whole city was quiet since Congress was not in session. I told her I was thinking about leaving her department.

"That would be a very interesting challenge," Dole said of the Inspector General job. "You could do some good. But be sure you know what you're getting into." I thought I knew what she meant; only later would I fully understand her warning.

I became the watchdog of the FAA. The FAA, in turn, stood guard over the airlines. But that role could be interpreted two ways: as policing the airlines to ensure safety at all costs or as protecting the airlines from any opposition or criticism. During five years as Inspector General, I came to realize that the FAA believed the statutes ordered it to champion the aviation industry.

Time and again, my office uncovered practices that would shock the public: sloppy inspections of planes, perfunctory review of pilots, lax oversight of airline procedures, disregard for bogus airplane parts, sievelike security at airports, antiquated air-traffic-control systems. Only with a major crash, only with people dead and sobbing survivors filling television screens, does the FAA step up to the plate and make changes. I found the FAA's complacency toward accidents difficult to accept.