Sen. Patty Murray's Letter to FAA Admin Marion Blakey

[libnnc]

August 31, 2006

The Honorable Marion Blakey
Administrator
Federal Aviation Administration
800 Independence Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20591



Dear Administrator Blakey:

The tragic accident of Comair Flight 5191 in Lexington, Kentucky raises a
critical question of whether your agency is adequately focused and
positioned to maintain a sufficiently trained and experienced controller
workforce that will guarantee the safety of the flying public. The Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) must move aggressively to hire sufficient
controllers to ensure that facilities like Lexington Tower will not have to
wait an inordinate amount of time to fill controller vacancies brought on by
retirements and other causes.

Your agency is to be commended for frankly and promptly admitting that, at
the time of the tragedy in Lexington, the air traffic control tower was
operating with only one controller, in violation of your agency’s own safety
directives. As I understand it, your senior safety managers issued a verbal
directive back in November of last year that control towers must have
separate controllers handling the ground operations and air operations at
all times. This directive was issued after a potentially catastrophic “near
miss” incident occurred while a controller was stationed alone in Raleigh,
North Carolina. Despite the importance of this directive, the Lexington
tower has been allowed to continually violate this directive on both
weekdays and weekends ever since April of this year, when the facility
experienced the retirement of one controller and the medical
disqualification of another.

FAA management did not discover the violation of its own safety directive
until after the tragedy in Lexington, when the agency discovered similar
violations at six other FAA towers. Given that the policy was implemented in
the wake of a recent near-tragedy in North Carolina, why were violations of
this policy allowed to persist at numerous facilities for an extended period
of time?

Let me be clear that I do not take it as a foregone conclusion that a second
controller on duty at the time of the accident could have prevented the
Lexington tragedy. Only the National Transportation Safety Board can tell us
the true cause of the accident and the measures that your agency and the
other parties will need to take in order to preclude such tragedies in the
future.

The fact remains, however, that the FAA’s staffing plans now call for three
new controllers at the Lexington tower to adequately meet traffic demands,
but those positions are not scheduled to be filled until 2007 and 2008. Such
a situation raises the question of whether your agency’s hiring plans will
meet the need to maintain safety across our entire national aviation system.

As you know, back in December of 2004, you released the FAA’s first
comprehensive staffing plan to address the large number of expected
retirements in your controller workforce. At that time, you stated that this
plan would be issued annually and updated each year to reflect your most
recent projections of your staffing needs. Despite this public commitment,
no updated report was issued in December 2005. When I asked you during
hearings in early May of 2006 why we had not received the report, you
assured the Subcommittee that we would be receiving it very soon. It wasn’t
until last week that you formally submitted the report – some eight months
late. It unfortunately required our Committee to propose large statutory
fines for the late submittal of the plan to get you to release it to us.

Our initial review of your updated report is worrisome. Since your initial
staffing plan was released in December of 2004, it appears that you now
anticipate a greater number of retirements at the same time as you plan to
hire fewer controllers to fill those losses, both for this year and next
year. I remain concerned that further lengthening the time it takes to fill
vacant positions – like those at Lexington tower – will only undermine the
essential safety work of your people in the field.

I would appreciate your response to the following questions regarding the
issues discussed above:


* Why did your agency issue its safety directive regarding minimum staffing
under certain tower configurations verbally rather than in writing?


* Why weren’t the persistent violations of this policy detected and
corrected more quickly?


* What circumstances have changed since December of 2004 such that you now
want to have fewer trained controllers on board, both this year and next
year?


* What explains the delay in transmitting your controller staffing plan this
year?


* Can we assume that your next controller staffing plan will be submitted in
March of 2007, consistent with the dictates included in the Senate
Transportation Appropriations bill for 2007?


Thank you in advance for your prompt response to these inquiries. As always,
I look forward to working with you to ensure the safety of our aviation
system, both domestically and internationally.

Sincerely,


Patty Murray
Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury, the Judiciary, Housing and Urban
Development, and Related Agencies

[uppityperson]

1. k&r for legislators working for good things.

Thank you Patty

[jdlh8894]

2. Thank you,Senator Murray

This message should have first been sent from the Senators and Reps. FROM Kentucky even if they are not on the Transportation Sub-Committee!