US auditors have slammed the Federal Aviation Administration's monitoring of airlines' maintenance and inspection programmes. This latest audit stems from concerns raised after the Alaska Airlines Boeing MD-80 crash on31 January 2000.
The Inspector General of the Transportation Department (IG) says the aviation agency's oversight of carriers, Continuing Analysis and Surveillance Systems (CASS), was inconsistent. CASS, introduced in 1964, is designed to give the FAA a way of holding airlines accountable for monitoring their own maintenance. After the Alaska Airlines crash, the FAA concluded that the carrier improperly deferred maintenance and did not have adequate controls or quality assurance.
The IG, accompanying FAA officials on various CASS inspections, found that the FAA did not ensure deficiencies are remedied after they have been identified. In one case, flaws as far back as 1996 were uncorrected four years later. In some instances, FAA inspectors merely attended a carrier's maintenance meetings and kept little documentation on inspections, "precluding effective trend analysis of inspection findings", says the IG, which wants better inspector training for evaluating CASS. Training now focuses on approving a carrier's CASS plan, mostly involving reviewing the CASS manual that a carrier has compiled, instead of testing the implementation Rather than annual CASS inspections, FAA inspectors conduct an annual risk analysis to see if a given carrier's CASS should be inspected. At Alaska, for example, the FAA had not performed any CASS reviews between August 1988 and the January 2000 crash.
Source: Flight International
