WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration announced Thursday its second effort in three years to stop its managers in Texas from covering up air-safety violations — after a new investigation found the misconduct continued into last year.
In the latest blow to an agency already under fire for letting airlines ignore its safety directives, the FAA announced that the top two managers of an air-traffic control facility in Dallas-Fort Worth had been removed from their jobs.
In addition, the Transportation Department’s inspector general found FAA managers in Dallas-Fort Worth routinely and intentionally misclassified instances where airplanes were allowed to fly closer together than they were supposed to, the FAA said. Instead of calling them operational errors or deviations from safety rules by FAA controllers, the managers labeled them pilot errors or nonevents.
“We’re not going to stand for this,” acting FAA administrator Bobby Sturgell told a news conference.
Hank Krakowski, a former United Airlines pilot and safety executive who became FAA’s chief operating officer in September, acknowledged that the FAA had promised to fix the problem in 2005, but “today it’s clear to us those commitments were not taken seriously by people in my organization who were responsible.”
He announced a new attempt to remedy the situation.
The FAA only learned of the continuing problem because a whistle-blower — controller supervisor Anne Whiteman, who first reported in 2004 that agency officials were concealing safety violations — had come forward again last year to say that FAA managers were still underreporting safety violations by FAA controllers or now misreporting them as pilot errors.
