The Art of Bureaucratic War

A federal watchdog report has raised serious concerns about the relationship between the FAA and Southwest Airlines (SWA). The report alleges Southwest and the FAA have been engaged in an ongoing private war of stonewalling and power-leveraging.

Federal investigators who authored the report cite shortcomings on both the airline’s and the agency’s parts in safeguarding public safety, and call attention to widespread operational and regulatory irregularities.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel compiled the report after four whistleblowers came forward with information and corroborative data indicating the FAA knowingly permitted SWA to engage in unsafe and improper actions that compromised the safety of the flying public.

Investigators accuse the FAA of failing to curtail Southwest’s propensity for assigning its maintenance personnel unrealistic volumes of work, then pressuring them to sign-off on work that was completed hurriedly, completed by persons outside the control or oversight of the individual doing the signing-off, or simply not completed.

The investigation confirmed that senior leadership at the Federal Aviation Administration—faced with intimidation tactics selectively applied by SWA—mismanaged and interfered with the inspectors charged with oversight of the airline between 2018 and 2020.

The report substantiates a February 2020 document in which the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General asserted: “The safety culture at Southwest Airlines consists of using ‘diversion, distraction, and power’ to get what the company wants.”

In addition to citing maintenance disconformities, the new report states the FAA was complicit in Southwest’s efforts to obfuscate serious incidents involving pilot error, and collaborated with the airline to allow substandard of unsafe pilots to continue flying.

The report also alleges the FAA fell short of its fiduciary responsibility to conduct inspections of gaps in the maintenance records of 49 Boeing 737s Southwest purchased from foreign companies—instead accepting the airline’s documentation for simplicity’s and alacrity’s sakes.

The FAA was further criticized for failing to ensure SWA complied with an agency mandate to predicate its aircraft weight and balance calculations on actual instead of estimated weights. The FAA’s failure to enforce its own edict resulted in more than four-thousand errors of three-hundred or more pounds between March 2018 and July 2019. Again, the agency blindly accepted Southwest’s documentation as accurate and forthright.

Former Southwest CEO Gary Kelly traded regular texts, phone calls, and emails the former Deputy/acting FAA Administrator that—according to the report—raised questions among [FAA] inspectors about whether they would be allowed to perform their oversight responsibilities appropriately.

FMI: www.faa.gov