Moved myself from other thread:
The "
Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act" falls into the weird zone. It doesn't prevent errors, it simply adds another stick to beat people with. Mostly, if an unexpected thing happens, then it can be claimed it happened because the organization failed to follow the generalized, non-specific, requirements. And then there are requirements that likely won't help.
For example:
(d) Safety Reporting Program.—The regulations issued under subsection (a) shall require a safety management system to include a confidential employee reporting system through which employees can report hazards, issues, concerns, occurrences, and incidents. A reporting system under this subsection shall include provisions for non-punitive reporting of such items by employees in a manner consistent with other confidential employee reporting systems administered by the Administrator. Such regulations shall also require a certificate holder described in subsection (a) to submit a summary of reports received under this subsection to the Administrator at least twice per year.
The complaint at hand was that the "
hazards, issues, concerns, occurrences, and incidents" and the claim is the reporting was ignored. The anonymity would not make the reporting more effective - whatever defects are being reported would remain if anonymously reported - and the reporter would then still have the dilemma of whether or not to stay in a position they are unable to affect vs. being moved to some other position where they can also not affect the outcome, just as when they are identified.
Make the system: A system of anonymous reporting to the FAA for which the FAA has to extract answers and report to Congress within 30 days of receipt.
Why not? Because Congress doesn't want the burden of reviewing the FAA work and certainly won't allocate funds to create, manage, or man this effort. On top of that, it would put Congress in the chain of accountability. Being anonymous, one could set up a campaign of hundreds of false complaints every month, week, or day in order to bring the company, the FAA, and Congressional oversight to their knees. If such harassment reporting can be traced, then it's not truly anonymous.
Moved from the other thread:
(e) Code Of Ethics.—The regulations issued under subsection (a) shall require a safety management system to include establishment of a code of ethics applicable to all employees of a certificate holder, including officers, which clarifies that safety is the organization’s highest priority.
A longtime favorite. If a person is unethical then a Code of Ethics won't change that. Pressed too hard as a priority and it moves to being background noise that even ethical people won't pay any attention to. They can remain ethical, but the campaign is an irritation, as if they cannot be trusted.
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For a law firm representing a whistle blower the main weapon I would expect them to use is the offer to sign an NDA in exchange for a large settlement. Unless the client wants otherwise, I would expect that of any damages litigation. The lack of publication isn't surprising.
2)
If the plaintiff wants to release the information, Wikileaks is available as are Google Docs.
In response to "strawman" then what happens to an item on a plane that is near delivery and they wait 6 months to deal with the complaint? How long was the door unsecured from the factory?