What Chance - HAI Chief Wants FAA to Ground Dangerous Operators

[Brian Abraham]

Helicopter Association International President Matt Zuccaro is appealing to the FAA to take action to "remove people who shouldn't be in the air."

During a "Meet the Regulators" session at last week's Heli-Expo in Dallas, Zuccaro noted that some companies operate at unacceptable safety levels, but their actions get the most attention and hurt the entire industry.

He conceded that it may be strange for a community to ask for more enforcement, but he notes that the industry must deal with the fallout of operators flying with thin safety margins.

The frustrating part, he adds, are operators who try to follow proper safety protocols but get cited for minor paperwork issues, while others operate without following those protocols with no FAA enforcements.

[SASless]

As if the FAA doesn't know who the culprits are either?

All one has to do is look at the history of the Helicopter EMS industry.....to know what to think of the FAA's ability to enforce Air Safety Regulations.

It would start with a look at themselves, their promotion policies, their priorities, and the way the system itself is set up.

They are hell on paperwork...but woefully inadequate on investigation and being pre-emptive on enforcing "safety" related issues.

[Shawn Coyle]

I doubt the FAA could stand an audit of their own operations, or anything like an SMS audit.

[rick1128]

The FAA will need to clean their house up first. The lack of standardization, quality assurance and operational control on the part of the FAA is in my opinion one of the major safety problems in the whole aerospace industry. On more than one occasion I have had POI's make major deals of spelling and punctuation errors, when I had bigger problems to solve. The documents in question were readable and understandable as they were. Two years ago I submitted an SMS manual for approval. We were a 2 aircraft, 3 pilot and 1 mechanic operation. Our manual was 32 pages with the QA program. Our POI was not happy with it and show me his grading standard. Another operator's 300 + pages SM program. This is the kind if BS we have put up with for years.

Unless there is a direct correlation the NTSB will not look at what effect of FAA foot dragging and BS may have had on the accident.