From an article I just read.
"Why the Uptick of Safety Failures?
First, the events playing out come on the tail end of Covid-19 shutdowns. When then-President Joe Biden started telework policies, many of the FAA aviation safety inspector (ASI) workforce stayed home. Onsite surveillance and oversight of FAA-certificate holders, including international component repair stations and overhaul facilities, were stopped. This means the United States has been blind to many FAA certificate holders’ activities, including many air operators, since 2020.
Second, the FAA suffered a mass exodus of knowledgeable and experienced ASIs who refused the Covid shot. Airlines and their contract providers also surrendered to the mandate.
Third, many “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) hires, in both government and industry, further reduced the level of experience of many in the industry. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ignored real safety issues by focusing on “racist roads” and DEI promotions. Buttigieg’s distractions meant safety took a back seat to ideology.
The path to safety failure has been years in the making; problems hiding in plain sight evolved into nightmares of industry’s own creation."
"Root Causes
The root causes of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines B737-Max accidents weren’t complacency, though it did play an important role. Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines’ bean counters played the most fundamental roles in the safety failures.
Poor skills don’t result from manufacturers not providing training to their customers; poor skills come from over dependency on technology. Where do bean counters fit in? Airlines invest in new high technology aircraft, like the Boeing B737-Max, to exploit the cost-savings the technology promises. Bean counters expect pilots and technicians to ignore honing their skills and instead let the aircraft fly itself or fix itself. Meanwhile, new aircraft technologies will continue to evolve with future innovations, like one- or zero-pilot cockpits.
Modern aircraft are also designed to be fuel-efficient; every aspect of an aircraft’s flight profile, from flight control settings to adjusting engine power, is intended to acquire the lowest fuel consumption. The caveat is the pilots must be hands-off. Today’s pilot programs the flight computer, which then plots the altitude, speed, and course. During the takeoff or landing phases, the pilot retracts/extends the gear and flaps, then sits back and babysits. Airlines push pilots to surrender authority to the aircraft because the aircraft computer flies more economically than the human pilot. While the results are improved fuel efficiency and lower costs, pilots become complacent. Their skills become stale; their competence atrophies."
Technicians are also restricted. Troubleshooting skills are discouraged. Airline management wants the aircraft to tell the technician what to fix. Skills that were common knowledge decades ago are not so common today, especially with developing fly-by-wire systems. The old ways are forgotten; they’ll never be passed on to the next generation."
Just as important, self-evaluations of safety and regulatory agencies are compromised. The FAA, still reeling from record ASI departures, is scrambling to train new-hire ASIs. Their experience levels have plummeted, meaning it will take incoming ASIs decades to build FAA job knowledge to pre-2020 levels. Remaining FAA veterans will never succeed in imparting decades of knowledge before they retire. All this while the FAA also faces challenges in aerospace and unmanned vehicles.
Meanwhile, the NTSB, hypothetical transportation detectives, is now demonstrating a fundamental lack of industry knowledge. Investigatory protocols are being trashed. Whether it has been from ignorance or a collective lack of experience, since the NTSB was established in 1967, it has not produced an accident report that has increased safety. Based on the NTSB’s debatable authority, it’s unclear how the aviation industry can expect the NTSB to understand and support aviation safety."
nypost.com
