Bowing to demands of travelers who want more safety-related information about airlines, the Federal Aviation Administration announced plans Wednesday to use the Internet to make government data available to anybody with a home computer.
The FAA also said that beginning Feb. 1 it will announce enforcement actions for alleged safety or security violations that are serious enough to carry civil penalties of $50,000 or more. Quarterly lists of all enforcement actions will be issued beginning April 1.
Travelers will be able to find out, for example, whether an airline has a record of near collisions or been fined for a major safety violation.
“I believe the FAA can find better and more timely ways of communicating with consumers about aviation safety,” said Linda Hall Daschle, the agency’s acting administrator. “We want the public to know what is going on, not just in the skies but in the airports, airline maintenance hangars and the legal arena as well.”
Aviation safety advocates were angered last year when it was learned only after the May crash of a ValuJet Airlines DC-9, that killed 110 in Florida, that the carrier had experienced a high number of safety-related incidents in the months preceding the accident.
Beginning Feb. 28, the FAA will have an Internet page at www.faa.gov dedicated to safety information. Included will be accident and incident data previously available only through the Freedom of Information Act.
Additional information is to be added during the year, and consumers ultimately will be able to get basic information about each U.S. airline, including the date of certification and types of planes they operate.
By March 31, the safety page will outline the “roles and responsibilities of the FAA, carriers, manufacturers, repair stations, passengers, safety and security inspectors, flight crews and others involved in the partnership to keep aviation in the United States the safest in the world,” Daschle said.
Geoff Collins, a spokesman for the International Airline Passengers Association, applauded the agency’s announcement.
The data will give consumers “the ability to make a reasonably intelligent choice (of airlines) if indeed safety is their primary concern,” Collins said. “It’s long overdue.”
But consultant David Stempler, president of AirTrav Advisors, had a different view.
“Information is good, but this is a consumer smokescreen,” he said. “What the public really wants from the FAA is safety first and information second. This resulted from the ValuJet situation where the FAA was sitting on information about problems at ValuJet and failed to act on them.”
Stempler also asserted that the new data will be subject to misinterpretation. For example, a safety-related incident at one airline may be far more serious than an incident at another, but there will be no way to determine degree of severity from the statistics, he said.
The information that will be provided is “relevant and important, but it is the basis for further examination,” Stempler said.
“This is being put out here to indirectly solve a problem they should be solving directly. The problem was, the FAA wasn’t doing its job.”
Daschle said her agency is seeking “the right balance between the public’s right to know” and the need to protect some information shared by the airlines and others on a voluntary basis.
The FAA “intends to make as much information public as possible, while protecting key information it receives voluntarily so that continued reporting that will lead to even higher levels of safety can be encouraged,” she said.
