The Federal Aviation Administration has a goal of customer satisfaction. Lest that make you feel all warm and fuzzy, consider that the customer it wants to satisfy isn’t you, the passenger. It’s the airline industry.
Understand that, and you understand the roots of the airport chaos that occurred this spring, after Congress heard that airliners had been flying around with cracks in their hulls while the FAA looked the other way.
Thousands of flights were grounded until aircraft could be inspected. Hundreds of thousands of passengers found themselves stranded at airports.
The attitude problem goes far beyond the FAA. Generally speaking, the Bush administration regulates for the benefit of industry, not people. That has a bad effect on the food you eat, the drugs you take, the air you breathe and the money in your wallet.

Last week, the Transportation Department’s inspector general issued a report on the incidents at Southwest Airlines that brought the whole FAA mess to light. The basic story has been known since last winter:
Southwest had neglected required hull inspections on its fleet of Boeing 737s for months. The airline then “self-reported” its goof to the local FAA office, thereby escaping a fine.
But the airline kept flying the uninspected aircraft for 1,451 flights over eight days — a serious violation. When the planes finally were inspected, cracks were found in five of them.
“We estimate that, in total, aircraft flew in violation of the AD (airworthiness directive) for up to nine months, carrying six million passengers,” the inspector general said.
It turned out that the FAA had been ignoring its own low-level inspectors, who had been complaining about such laxity for three years.
When word of the mess finally got out, the FAA ordered an audit at all airlines. It soon discovered other inspection lapses, causing a mass grounding of planes. The impact was particularly heavy on the MD-80 aircraft of American Airlines, the major carrier at Lambert St. Louis International Airport.

The inspector general’s report added some insight as to why this all occurred: “It appears that FAA management fostered a culture whereby air carriers were considered the primary customer of its oversight mission instead of the flying public.”
That fostered an “overly collaborative” relationship between Southwest and the FAA’s Dallas office, the report said. Overall, the inspector general found “serious lapses” in the FAA’s oversight, and not only at Southwest.
Mr. Bush long has inveighed against the heavy hand of regulation. What’s replaced it is the light tap on the wrist, and not only at the FAA.
Former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt promised a “kinder and gentler” attitude toward accountants, and soon there was the collapse of Enron and a parade of other corporate scandals stemming from phony accounting.
The industry lawyer placed in charge of the Consumer Products Safety Commission told Congress that the commission had enough funding. And so we have children chewing on toys with lead paint from China.
The lumber industry controls lumber regulations, the mine industry the Mine Safety and Health Administration, etc., etc. It’s so much more convenient when you remove the middle man.
So it’s no surprise that the attitude at the FAA became, “Let’s not look too closely at the safety practices of airlines. We wouldn’t want to disturb their business.”
Let’s hope the next administration recognizes that its “customer” is the American people.