Washington, D.C.
Good afternoon, and thank you, Greg [Principato].
This really is a new day. Wed have to agree not many of us saw this coming 30 years ago. Now, were creating standards for unmanned aircraft that come in at 5 ounces or 5 pounds or 5 tons. Were talking about package delivery beyond the line of sight right to your front door. Were getting ready for the edge of space 62 miles straight up. Thats Flight Level 3-1-7-0. There hasnt been much use for a 4-digit altimeter check in the NAS, but it seems there will be soon enough.
Unmanned aircraft and commercial space. But before we can talk about the mighty Amazon not the river or the final Frontier not the airline lets go to the basics. Set commercial space and unmanned vehicles aside. Lets consider maybe the most basic element of safety out there the rivet a fairly good representation of safety itself.
Unless youre a mechanic, discussions of rivets begin and end with Rosie. She had biceps before biceps were in. But there are other times the word pops up, like a riveting conversation. Levis rivets as a fashion statement. Or the Titanic rivets as part of a faulty design, faulty construction, a Night to Remember that ended on the ocean floor.
But in the business of commercial aviation, small rivets are a big deal. There are millions upon millions of them out there, most put in place with robotic precision. Theres an old mechanic joke that an aircraft is a million rivets flying in formation. I think its fair to say that rivets are at the very foundation of aviation safety, the very symbol of safety. They are a sure thing, a 99.9999, six sigma kind of sure thing. Because of that, when passengers board a commercial aircraft today, they dont worry about rivets. Instead, the big concern is whether or not your bags are going to get to Kennedy, which is nice, especially if you happen to be going to Kennedy.
Like the people who make them, who install them, maintain them and fly the planes that use them, the rivet has a foundational role in the safety that gets us where we wanted to go.
The engineers in the audience know that a rivet isnt good for much before its installed. But once the rivet is put in a hole thats punched or drilled, it expands to about double its size, which holds two pieces of metal together, almost forever. We rely on rivets because theyre permanent, so much so that theyre eponymous, like being riveted to a good book. The rivet is a pretty apt metaphor for safety itself.
The fact of the matter is that our system works on the big thingslike an A-380, the little things like a rivet and all the other things in between. Our hyper-focus on safety even on the tiniest rivet is why it is the way it is. For commercial aviation in the United States, the ratio of successful takeoffs and successful landings is one-to-one. When theres a possibility however slight that something might go wrong, CNN makes the world stand still with a breaking news update and we stare at a nose wheel or a runway or something like that. Its usually much ado about nothing. The ending is fairly predictable: the plane landed without incident. Thats how it works 99.9 percent of the time.
Going back to the beginning, the public wasnt so sure about those flying machines, or anything involved with them. Remember, it was industry that asked government to step in and regulate. There wasnt much optimism about whether this nascent industry was a good idea at all, much less would it really take off. At its core, even then, it was all about the passenger.
Through the years, accdients were a part of the industry. It seemed everyone involved in the early decades of flight was in an accident, or lost friends or family. We learned from each one and improved the level of safety.
The 1980s began with Alfred Kahn, but in 1982, just about four miles from here, Air Florida and the 14th Street Bridge shifted the public mindset away from his vision of deregulation and onto something else. Several more icing accidents followed at Philadelphia, Denver, Cleveland and LaGuardia. And it was a cold morning in January 1986 that put Christa McAuliffes name into the lexicon of icing as well.
The accident trend wasnt all about weather. 1986, a mid-air over Cerritos. Two years later, Aloha Airlines challenged our faith in rivets but gave birth to the aging aircraft program. And 1989, hydraulics failure at Sioux City. The deaths of celebrities and politicians. All of those came to a head in the 1980s.
The numbers werent good. There were more than a thousand fatalities during the 80s. And while it was better than the safety record of the 1950s when there was a major accident almost once a week just doing better wasnt good enough. Around this time, we saw another shift in public perception. Where aviation had been lauded for examining accidents, learning those lessons and making improvements for the future we were now accused of having a tombstone mentality.
Whether that perception was accurate or fair didnt really matter. It appeared accidents were part of a trend that was escalating and disturbing at the same time. Wreckage-strewn photographs on every front page were nothing short of haunting. Unquestionably, there was a need for change. As you know, calling for change is the easy part. Bringing about change in an industry that back then had 6,900 aircraft, 55,000 pilots and 580 million passengers a year is another matter altogether. Thats a lot of moving parts.
But to its credit, the FAA and industry took that on. There were 400 recommendations for improvement, coming from NTSB, GAO, OIG, and those talking heads who seem to be paid by the word. The 1990s started with us scrambling to address those past accidents. It was a hard time especiallysince a lot of the low-hanging fruit for accident causes was gone. We were getting to the point where the answer to the question, Whats the most common cause of a commercial airplane accident? was There is no common cause.
Then came ValuJet an operational issue that showed just how intricate the road to probable cause can become. What started out as an order to clean up a shop room floor ended with a loose tire in a forward storage area striking a discarded oxygen canister, and you know the rest. Then, TWA 800. That accident raised questions about some fundamental design assumptions we had made about managing fuel flammability.
The public was asking, Is the FAA still relevant?, and I cant say that was an unfair question. We took it to heart. When all was said and done, the launch of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team made the difference.
The history of CAST is a quick study. The work of the White House Commission, Vice President Gore, and the National Civil Aviation Review Commission NCARC spurred the industry not just to do something, but to make a sea change. A 5-fold reduction in fatal accidents, in 10 years. CAST responded by setting a goal to cut the commercial fatal accident rate by 80 percent. So, let me say this: D.C. is brimming with ideas on how things need to change. But as we know, many of those goals come and go. So when CAST put this out there, which we know now was the right way to go, I do remember thinking, 80 percent. Thats an awfully big jump.
But we did it. In 10 years. The actual improvement came in at 83 percent.
The how is worth considering. We responded by pulling together safety experts from FAA, NASA, Defense. And industry representatives from AIA, ALPA, APA, ATA, now A4A, the Flight Safety Foundation, NACA and RAA. There were others, but you get the idea. When all of these people come together, you not only have a huge amount of experience, but you have an equally large amount of drive for a course correction.
The turnabout in aviation safety began with leveraging data to develop a prioritized safety agenda. Thats exactly what we did. Based on detailed data analysis, CAST developed and implemented a safety portfolio targeted at the high fatality risk areas. The key to its success was the voluntary adoption of safety enhancements an accomplishment that would not have been possible through regulatory mandates.
Partnership was the touchstone for that change. And it underscored the main point: it is all about the passenger. Intrinsically, we recognized that any kind of a boost in system safety wasnt going to happen on its own. The key here is that we had to get rid of the me-against-you, us-versus-them mentality.
As a lawyer, I can say that I understand the trepidation on both sides of the table. On one hand, you have the regulator and a rule book that can slay a forest. On the other hand, you have an industry filled primarily with straight shooters who want to keep things moving. Both sides want things to be safe, for obvious reasons. Getting both sides to come together on a shared definition of how to do that was the tricky part.
To take the next step in safety we changed the very foundation of safety analysis. Forensic data gave way to voluntary safety programs. We started sharing our safety concerns and best practices. The maintenance issue Airline A thought was happening only to its planes turned out to be happening on the shop floors of Airline B as well. Because of the kind of candor we see at gatherings like InfoShare and in the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing program, it wasnt uncommon to discover that it was happening across the industry.
As all of this came together, the history of aviation safety had closed the book on one chapter and began writing a new one altogether. The use of forensic accident analysis the very thing that raised the hue and cry about tombstone mentality was no longer our primary approach to get to the bottom of things. Prognostics were now not only possible, they were the path to a new day. We still learn from accidents and incidents. Its just that now, were not in the position where we have to wait for something to go wrong to make advances in safety. The data lets us identify the hazards and the mitigations.
As they always say, the bottom line is what counts, and in our case, the bottom line at year end for US commercial aviation fatalities is at or near zero. At one stretch, we went better than two years without a fatality. During that same period, more than a billion passengers traveled safely. As Ive said before, its all about the passenger.
Let me pause for a moment. While we all worked hard to reach these goals, no one worked harder than Jay Pardee our friend and colleague who many of you knew. We lost Jay quite suddenly last month, but to the end, he was the driving force behind all this. We realized early on that Jay Pardee was looking at aviation safety through an entirely new lens. He pushed us in the direction of voluntary data sharing and analysis. And he was absolutely right. The accident rate proves that. His work will live on for many years because we are dedicated to continuing his efforts. Thats exactly the kind of legacy he deserves. Jay Pardee changed aviation safety. Not a lot of people can make that claim. We will miss him.
As a new chapter in the history of commercial aviation continues to be written, we find ourselves with the kind of problem you want to have: when your safety numbers are already so low that you must count close calls, accidents that didnt happen, where do you go?
As we saw with CAST, the answer lies in partnering for the future to an even greater degree. I think its important to address a criticism I hear a lot, and that is the FAA inhibits technology and innovation. Yes, Government moves cautiously. Thats a fair point. But put into the context of making it all about the passenger and reassuring the public, our emphasis on being deliberative is very clearly by design. Rulemaking and certification are not the place to rush to judgment. Things like peer review, cost-benefit analysis and comment periods were put in place to make sure that we minimize unintended consequences.
In a lot of ways, weve become a one-click society. Aviation safety does not work that way, and its at our peril if somebody tries to make it that way. There are no short cuts to safety. Safety advancements that endure take time. More importantly we must ensure that any change we make in the aviation system does not compromise the level of safety we have worked hard to establish.
But if you look at FAA, youll see we are changing, too. As aircraft have become more sophisticated, weve had to change the way we operate the NAS. NextGen isnt next by any means. Its now. Talk to line pilots about point to point navigation, GPS, performance based navigation. Weve shown that we can put it in place.
Our push to operate in a way that keeps things moving is paying off. The wake recategorization effort took turbulence numbers that had been in place for years and put better science in place. That effort has Delta showing reductions in taxi-out time from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. FedEx is saving 3 minutes in taxi-out time.
That work continues. Were working at being smarter, nimbler, quicker. Were putting risk-based decision-making in place to make sure that we focus our resources where they need to be focused. Were trying to get out of the business of carrying programs and projects simply because weve always carried those programs and projects. Like safety audits theyre important, but over the years theyve gotten out of hand. Weve had some repair stations that have an audit from various FAA offices, or another aviation authority, or an airline it works for, or some third-party audit organization, 50 weeks a year. With a risk based approach, were making headway to reduce that redundancy. Or if you run an airline, youre already seeing that were using performance data to target oversight based on risk not some rote schedule. Its time to look to the future.
The word partnership always seems to give rise to accusations that were in bed with industry. Partnership does not put an end to our role as the regulator, nor does it put an end to the duty to comply with the regulations. Its the tenor of the discussion thats changed. Our push is not obey the rules or else. The rules arent there as a deterrent: theyre in place to assure safety. Through Safety Management Systems, were working in partnership to raise the safety bar together. In bed with industry? No. Partnering with industry to increase safety? Absolutely.
How do we balance all of this? That, of course, is the million dollar question. We balance all of this by remaining true to the bedrock foundation of safety. The essence of those rivets does not change. The passengers attitude toward safety does not change. The passenger wants it in the same category as the rivet: something no one thinks about, because its just always there.
Were moving more and more toward what we call a just culture, one that has both an expectation of and an appreciation for self-disclosure of errors. Were not in the place where gotcha is the coin of the realm.
A just culture allows for honest mistakes, especially in a complex system like this one. This is not to say that mistakes are viewed with a shrug. The intent of a just culture is that you see it, you study it and you learn and mitigate it, whatever the it happens to be. When we get to that place, thats when the numerator of fatalities will drop to zero and stay there as a matter of course.
Dont think thats a pipe dream. I think we could see that in our lifetime. As I mentioned at the outset, aviation is in a new place on a new day. And were equal to the task. Weve shown that weve learned from our mistakes, and weve learned to make things better while doing so. Weve kept safety as a foundational value. Thats why you dont spend your time wondering about rivets, because theyre so dependable. Safety is equally dependable. Most people never even give it a second thought.
But most of the people in this room do. We think about it all the time. Weve driven an accident level down to historic lows, and weve managed to make sure that the focus remains on the passenger. My commitment to you is that we intend to keep it that way. Thank you.
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