The safety oversight of all civil aviation activity in a large country is a fearsome responsibility and a difficult task. In small countries the task is no easier, because the civil aviation authority is scaled down proportionately, and if the economy is weak it can also be starved of resources.
There is always an issue, then, about how to deploy finite resources to the greatest effect, and authorities are right to review the way they do things as aviation becomes more complex.
This is what the US Federal Aviation Administration has done recently with that most fundamental of its oversight responsibilities: making sure that airlines keep their maintenance standards high. It took two tragic accidents, and subsequent serious embarrassments for the FAA's own organisation, to make the FAA review its system of checks, but at least it is now reacting. The question is whether the reaction is the best one.
The FAA's most recent embarrassment was its discovery this year that Alaska Airlines, a long established and well respected carrier, had a thoroughly imperfect maintenance quality control system. The first major embarrassment, however, was the revelation in the 1996 ValuJet McDonnell Douglas DC-9 crash inquiry that a fast-expanding airline which the FAA had been monitoring carefully had completely lost its way as far as maintenance quality control was concerned.
As the FAA has now admitted, its audit of Alaska's maintenance revealed as many faults in its own checking system as it did in the airline's maintenance organisation. Traditional maintenance oversight has been based on checking the product - carrying out spot checks on hangar work and line aircraft. Of course another type of check was the reactive one: a crash happens - as in the case of ValuJet or Alaska, and the subsequent investigation is very thorough.
Now the FAA has decided to adopt a top-down approach rather than the old bottom-up check system. This entails auditing all the airlines to ensure that they have a structured maintenance quality control system in which the lines of responsibility at all levels are clear. It is not a new concept. Quality control standards like ISO 9000 are all awarded on the basis of top-down checks on lines of responsibility and fail-safe organisational design.
It is interesting to compare another recently installed pair of quality control checking systems. These operate in the touchy area of ensuring some level of national influence on the maintenance and operational quality of foreign airlines which operate into any given country. First the USA set up its International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) system, and now Europe has established its Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft.
The US system operates top-down by assessing a country's safety oversight system for compliance with International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards and recommended practices (SARPS), and Europe has a bottom-up system based on checking arriving aircraft and crews for compliance with SARPS, and building a database of poor performers so that representations can be made to the aircraft's state of registration.
Meanwhile, in 1998 ICAO itself was voted the power to carry out national safety oversight system audits, but although a significant addition to the world's system for maintaining SARPS, these audits could not be made frequently. National, and now regional (like the European Joint Aviation Authorities) systems, remain the cornerstones on which safety cultures are built.
The fact is that neither a top-down nor a bottom up system of checks is adequate alone, so any state or aviation authority which concentrates too much on one system of checking to the detriment of the other is making a mistake. It should be fundamental for an aviation authority today to demand that companies demonstrate a sound quality control structure as a condition for the issue of a licence to trade, but all aviation is still so intensely reliant on the skills and thoroughness of individual human beings that mistakes will get through the net. So policing the front line must remain a basic component of a good safety oversight system.
Source: Flight International
