Saturday, May 17, 2008
How accurate are airline crash investigations if the people conducting them have a financial stake in the outcome?
Dec 6, 1999 | An independent think tank will release a much-anticipated study Thursday, to assess the National Transportation Safety Board's ability to police itself. Considering the thousands of lives and billions of liability dollars at stake, the $400,000 study's recommendations are of great interest to airlines, aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions, victims' families -- anybody with a stake in the fairness and justice of air-crash investigations.
Controversy surrounds the NTSB's current method of investigating commercial air crashes. Experts in a given field, such as engineers, designers and psychologists, are invited to serve on fact-finding committees headed by NTSB investigators. These experts include employees of airlines, aircraft manufacturers and other suppliers. In other words, the people with the biggest potential financial liabilities in the crash are helping determine the cause of it.
The NTSB commands a rare level of respect among government agencies. Admired by both Democrats and Republicans, it has a golden international reputation for thoroughness, fairness and heroic achievement.
But potential conflicts of interest forced Jim Hall, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, the government agency charged with investigating commercial air disasters, to commission a study by the highly-respected, non-partisan think-tank, RAND.
The study will delve into what many consider to be the NTSB's glaring weakness -- its insistence on using potential defendants as key information suppliers.
Defenders of the current "party system" say it creates a universal conflict-of-interest that, in the end, produces balanced findings. But critics counter that the agency does not exert enough authority over industry parties to disclose information that could implicate them in the cause of deadly accidents. Attorneys for victims families say the NTSB keeps a cozy relationship with the airline industry, one which unfairly excludes victim families' from the table.
The NTSB is no ordinary government agency filled with bureaucratic clock-watchers. It's a collection of brave men and women wearing bio-hazard suits at the scene of gruesome commercial air disasters. They often buckle at the knees in emotional torment at what they've witnessed.
The work they accomplish is remarkable. In the TWA Flight 800 crash, for example, they recovered over 95 percent of the 400,000 pound aircraft along with the remains of all 230 aboard who were killed. An amazing feat in and of itself, never mind that it was done from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
By federal standards, the NTSB is a small agency. Of the 400 people on staff, 130 are devoted to the Office of Aviation Safety, the arm that investigates commercial air crashes. NTSB investigates over 2,000 air accidents, the overwhelming majority of which are "general aviation" events (private pilots flying a Cessna, for example).
In May, Cindy Lebow, director of the NTSB-commissioned RAND study presented some of its initial findings to Congress. She testified that NTSB personnel are overworked (52 hours per week compared to the industry average of 42 hours), undertrained (40 percent of the NTSB's most experienced employees reported they're not training at all) and underpaid (RAND's survey deemed NTSB's salary structure "not competitive.").
Boeing's role in the TWA Flight 800 investigation sparked much of the current controversy over the NTSB's party system. Over 18 groups were formed to examine everything from flight data recorders, medical forensics, and aircraft performance to cockpit voice recorders, air traffic control and airport security. Later, it was discovered that Boeing withheld a key study from the Flight 800 investigation. At issue was whether the air conditioning unit was built too close to the center fuel tank, creating flammable vapors. Boeing vigorously disputed this explosion theory and told the NTSB it did not have any studies proving or disproving it.
Not only was there a Boeing study showing potential vapor problems on 747s, company officials had openly discussed the report earlier this year in a conference about the safety of the military version of the 747. It took three years, the chairman of a Senate judiciary subcommittee, the GAO and a Freedom of Information Act filing to get Boeing to acknowledge and then release the study. Boeing claims there was a miscommunication between its commercial and military divisions.
"Manufacturers are defending their product even as they help in an investigation of that product," said Terry O'Reilly, an aviation attorney representing some of the pilots and victim families of the Flight 800 tragedy. "It's like getting an arsonist to help determine the cause of the fire."
Not everyone agrees with O'Reilly, but a lot of fence-sitters were pushed to his side once Boeing's actions were made public.
Party-system critics point to Boeing's conduct as an example of how compromised an NTSB investigation can get. They say the system is a set-up for unethical and possibly illegal behavior. When part of its investigation committee has to be investigated, critics say it's time for NTSB to change.
The party system was developed in the 1960s. The point was to leverage technical expertise in the most effective way possible. Why have a bloated bureaucracy when you could just "borrow" technical expertise? After all, who is going to know more about the design of an aircraft than its manufacturer?
The party system has served the NTSB well, according to Norm Manetta, the former congressman from California's Silicon Valley who had NTSB oversight as chairman of the aviation subcommittee from 1979-1991. "I can't recall a single instance where a party member was found to withhold information," he said. "By and large, the system itself keeps everyone open and honest." Manetta is referring to the fact that almost everyone in an NTSB "party" is compromised in some way. They're all afraid of the consequences of being found liable. The airlines, aircraft manufacturers, pilot unions and other groups all have a vested interest in deflecting blame.
It's this universal conflict-of-interest that Manetta says makes the party system work. "The parties on a team," he said, "have to convince the other parties on the team" which is headed by an NTSB investigator. "For every force that wants to steer the investigation one way," he said, "there are equal and opposite forces steering the other way."
Get Salon in your mailbox!