Senators on Wednesday urged the Federal Aviation Administration to implement a 2005 recommendation that airlines be required to check the training histories of pilots they hire, an issue in a February air crash near Buffalo, N.Y.
Mark Rosenker, the acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told a Senate committee probing safety issues related to FAA's oversight of regional airlines that the board urged three years ago that airlines be required to request a pilot's complete training history from the agency.
FAA has declined to make the recommendation mandatory, choosing instead to tell air carriers that they will provide training records if pilots sign a privacy waiver. FAA administers the flight checks that pilots must pass to qualify to fly commercial airliners.
Officials for Colgan Air Inc. of Manassas, Va., have acknowledged they didn't seek the training history of pilot Marvin Renslow when they hired him. Renslow — the captain of Continental Express 3407, which crashed Feb. 12, killing all 49 aboard and a man on the ground — didn't disclose to Colgan when he was hired that he had previously failed several tests of his piloting skills.
Colgan operated the flight for Continental.
Rosenker told the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee's aviation subcommittee, which held the hearing, that FAA has also failed to implement hundreds of other NTSB recommendations.
"That to me is an indictment of the FAA," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said it has been the agency's position that it's not obligated to implement every one of NTSB's recommendations. Sometimes the board will recommend steps or equipment for which the technology doesn't exist and would take years to develop. Other times the agency disagrees with the board's conclusions.
However, Babbitt said the agency has "an obligation to explain to the NTSB and the public why we don't adopt it" when it rejects a recommendation.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., urged Babbitt to act swiftly to require airlines check with FAA on the training histories of the pilots they hire.
"There are a lot of recommendations out there," Dorgan said. "I don't want the next airline tragedy to be one in which we discuss a recommendation that we knew about and was not implemented."
Babbitt, a former airline pilot who has been running the agency about two weeks, promised to look into the matter.
"Give me a week," he told Dorgan.
NTSB has issued 419 recommendations to FAA since 2000 that are still outstanding, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said. However, only 37 recommendations issued before 2000 remain open, she said.
Sometimes NTSB closes recommendations that have not been acted on and labels them "unacceptable." But in the vast majority of cases — over 80 percent — the board has declared FAA's response to its recommendations "acceptable," Brown said.
The Buffalo crash has turned a spotlight on safety at regional airlines, which often hire pilots with significantly less experience and pay them lower salaries than major airlines.
Testimony at an NTSB hearing last month on the crash revealed that a series of critical errors by Renslow and co-pilot Rebecca Shaw preceded the crash. Their Bombardier Dash 8-Q400, a twin-engine turboprop, experienced an aerodynamic stall before plunging to the ground.
Babbitt and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood have announced they will hold a meeting Monday with the airline industry regarding pilot training and other safety issues.
The Transportation Department's inspector general, Calvin Scovel also told the committee the FAA's Air Transportation Oversight Systems has missed inspections at eight major airlines, some of which are nearly two years overdue. He said some of the missed inspections were in critical maintenance areas.
Scovel also expressed concern that oversight systems office's purview is being extended to include regional carriers as well as larger airlines.
FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere said the agency is conducting its inspections based on risk analyses.
"It is our position that the critical safety issues have been dealt with and are always dealt with first," Spitaliere said. "Some of the less critical ones may not have been accomplished, but we're currently working to accomplish them."
