Mary Schiavo - Flying Blind

Flying Blind

In 1997, after leaving her post at the DOT and long before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Schiavo wrote Flying Blind, Flying Safe, a scathing expose of the fraud, corruption, waste, mismanagement, and dangerous negligence in the aviation industry and the FAA as a crusader for flight safety. Her primary criticisms in the book focus on the FAA's reluctance to address its many shortcomings, while expressing her concern that there was a fundamental conflict of interest between the FAA job of oversight and the FAA job of promoting aviation.

In Flying Blind, Schiavo describes how the FAA uses a formula ascribing specific monetary value to human lives, and how the agency allows numbers to decide whether the cost of extra safety is worth the additional expense (e.g., if equipping an airline fleet with smoke detectors would cost $100 million, but would only save 10 lives each worth $1 million, then the expense is ruled out). Schiavo is similarly critical of the internal FAA politics and the FAA's Administrators. She writes, "I can't remember when I started calling these men the 'Kidney Stone Administrators', but I do know that it became apparent to me early on that they were tolerated only because everyone at the FAA knew it was merely time before they would pass."

One reviewer was critical of the book, because he felt that "er fundamental mistake is to argue that the FAA should pursue safety literally at all cost." Schiavo criticized the FAA for assigning monetary values to human lives; however laws requiring cost-benefit analyses (like the Regulatory Flexibility Act) require the FAA to assign monetary values to all potential losses and to analyze the cost to the public if a proposed rule is implemented and the cost if the rule is not implemented, so some of her criticisms would be better aimed at the entire US governmental regulatory system, and not just at the FAA. The book has also been faulted many times for factual errors both scientific and legal. Nonetheless, there seems to be common agreement that her efforts to expose FAA issues were as valiant as the misguided attempt to plant an unaccompanied bag on an airliner. The later resulted in the shutting down of Port Columbus for four hours, the loss of her professorship and an FBI investigation.