Jury Is Out on FAA’s Revisions

Some questions and concerns remain on the Federal Aviation Administration’s invitation to the public to draw its own conclusions about airline safety.

First, the FAA says that it will issue regular press releases about air safety enforcement actions that result in fines of $50,000 or more. Great, but notice that it took months of criticism in the wake of last year’s ValuJet airliner crash to get the FAA to this point. Other federal agencies announce enforcement actions as a matter of routine.

The FAA also says it will add accident and incident data to its public access Web pages on the Internet. Previously, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the public had to resort to petitioning under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain facts about emergency landings, engine shutdowns and other safety-related incidents.

Still, the FAA is stepping back from some of the ideas it considered last year, among them ranking airlines according to their safety records. Now critics worry that airlines might be less likely to make voluntary announcements of events that might show up on a Web page; federal regulations do not require such disclosures. The FAA may need to adopt a policy making such disclosures mandatory.

It should be noted that none of these decisions by the FAA alleviate the agency’s need to respond more quickly--and publicly--to new information. It took the ValuJet crash to spotlight the need for smoke detectors in all air carrier cargo holds, for example.

Now that the FAA is about to become the first arm of the federal government to allow public access to lists of sensitive information on a Web page, it must acknowledge the possibility of damaging mischief and protect against it. The FAA should launch its Web pages with an eye toward careful and regular monitoring and strong security. Why? Between August and December, computer hackers broke into three federal Web sites, altering information and adding false data. That’s one more thing the FAA must consider as it finally makes an attempt to be more open with the public.