Criticism
Many experts on FAA have been critical of what they perceive as fundamental problems with the agency in conducting oversight on the airlines and pilots, predicated on the belief, as expressed by FAA itself, that both the airlines and pilots are their customers. Retired NASA Office of Inspector General Senior Special Agent Joseph Gutheinz, who formerly was a Special Agent with both the U.S. Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General and FAA Security, is one of the most outspoken critics of FAA. Rather than commend the agency for imposing a 10.2 million dollar fine against Southwest Airlines for its failure to conduct mandatory inspections in 2008, he was quoted as saying the following in an Associated Press story: "Penalties against airlines that violate FAA directives should be stiffer. At $25,000 per violation, (which is how the 10.2 million dollar figure was reached) Gutheinz said, airlines can justify rolling the dice and taking the chance on getting caught. He also said the FAA is often too quick to bend to pressure from airlines and pilots."
Other experts have been critical of the constraints and expectations of the under which the FAA is expected to operate. The dual role of encouraging aerospace travel and regulating aerospace travel are counter intuitive. For example; to levy a heavy penalty upon an airline for violating an FAA regulation which would impact their ability to continue operating would not be considered, encouraging aerospace travel. Risk and safety management author Davic Soucie who served 17 years as a safety inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration including 4 years in the FAA headquarters office in Washington DC discusses this issue in his book Why Planes Crash - An Accident Investigator's Fight for Safe Skies.
Read more about this topic: Federal Aviation Administration
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)