Senator Calls Agency's AA Groundings "Chicken"

A US senator from Oklahoma called the Federal Aviation Administration "chicken" this week, for its role in massive groundings of American Airlines jets in April.

Republican Tom Coburn told attendees at a Tulsa town hall meeting the groundings of 299 MD-82 and MD-83 airliners -- which resulted in over 3,400 cancelled flights, and tens of thousands of stranded passengers -- occurred only because FAA inspectors wanted to save face... not protect the flying public.

"Never was there a risk for the flying public," Coburn said. "Not once. And the FAA will tell you that. But they're chickens. Rather than doing the job right and what's best, we made a spectacle of American Airlines and we stranded people all across this country," Coburn said Tuesday, reports Tulsa World.

As ANN reported, American first cancelled some 500 flights on April 8, so the airline could reinspect its fleet of MD-80 airliners to ensure proper stowage of wiring bundles inside the aircrafts' maingear wells. Those checks weren't quick once-overs... and by April 15, over 3,400 American flights had been scrapped.

The airline first pulled planes from service two weeks before to inspect the bundles, cancelling 400 flights in the process... but when FAA inspectors returned to the carrier's Tulsa maintenance center to check the carrier's work, they found several planes still out of compliance with the 2006 Airworthiness Directive mandating a 1.25-inch clearance between the wires and adjoining components.

In the days following the groundings, many accused the FAA of political grandstanding, at the expense of the world's largest passenger airline. Former NTSB board member John Goglia told the New York Times, "...those airplanes could have flown for the rest of their careers and those wires would not have been a problem."

Those groundings not only threw a wrench in the nation's transport network, Coburn says, but they also contributed to American's increasingly tenuous financial state.

"A $100 million cost to shut that airplane down for something that was never, at any time, a safety factor," he said.

FMI: www.aa.com, http://coburn.senate.gov/public/