U.S.

Air Safety Probe Widens

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

June 30, 2000 / 11:38 AM EDT / CBS

Federal regulators Thursday accepted Alaska Airlines' plan to tighten up its safety oversight after a crash earlier this year but announced plans to conduct special checks of other major carriers over 120 days.

The Federal Aviation Administration, asking itself why problems with Alaska's maintenance records weren't spotted sooner, said it would examine key safety procedures at the other nine big airlines.

The FAA found serious lapses in repairs record-keeping at Alaska Airlines during an intensive safety inspection that followed the Jan. 31 crash of an Alaska Airlines MD-80 off the California coast that killed all 88 people on board.

Those findings led the FAA in early June to threaten to withdraw Alaska Air Group's authority to perform, or even contract out, heavy maintenance work, a move that would have slowly shrunk the carrier's fleet.

FAA said it was satisfied with the thrust of the changes that Alaska Airlines was carrying out, although it would maintain a large presence of inspectors at the airline until at least mid-July.

"The plan, quite frankly, looks good,"Nick Lacey, FAA flight standards director, told reporters. "I must say we will not hesitate to take strong action if it becomes necessary."

Alaska Airlines has insisted it never knowingly allowed a plane to fly in an unsafe condition but the airline and FAA expect fines will be levied for some of the problems.

President and Chief Operating Officer Bill Ayer said the airline had gone through an extraordinarily difficult time. "Now it's up to us to assure ourselves, the FAA, and our customers, that we are up to the job," Ayer told reporters in Seattle.

The FAA agrees flight safety was not compromised by the record-keeping problems it found, but is troubled that Alaska Airlines could not verify that the work had been done. "A paper trail is very important," Lacey said.

The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the crash of Flight 261, and the U.S. attorney's office since late 1998 has been probing charges that Alaska falsified maintenance records.

The pilots of the doomed jet reported problems controlling the tail-mounted horizontal stabilizer minutes before it plunged into the Pacific.

Investigators have focused on a jackscrew assembly driving the stabilizer, which was found coated with metal shards and appeared not to have been properly lubricated.

Alaska has defended its maintenance on the plane despite a mechanic's disclosure that he had called for replacement of that jackscrew because it was worn nearly to the legal limit.

Alaska says the mechanic, John Liotine, is a disgruntled employee who was ousted as union president. He now is on paid leave.

Last week, Alaska's top maintenance official, John Fowler, announced he would retire, citing five months of intense scrutiny of the carrier's engineerng division after the January crash.

The FAA said as part of the plan, the airline had committed to steps including:

hiring more than 130 mechanics; 82 are already on board
creating an executive-level safety officer who reports directly to the chief executive
revising maintenance procedures in its general manual
submitting a three-year operations growth plan

Lacey said the FAA would soon send six-person inspection teams to the other major carriers that account for 89 percent of scheduled traffic.

They are United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines, US Airways, Continental Airlines, Trans World Airlines, Southwest Airlines and America West.

Major regional airlines and cargo carriers would be next to be examined for internal procedures to ensure safety.

The Alaska Airlines special inspection findings and the criminal probe have raised questions about why the FAA's regular inspection findings did not uncover deficiencies.

"We are looking at ourselves equally hard," said FAA's Lacey but airlines also had a major role to play. "We should not have to be there every day."