Nearly 10 days after an EgyptAir jet plunged into the North Atlantic, killing all 217 on board, federal authorities have yet to announce whether necessary repairs had been completed on the Boeing 767.
In part, that is because maintenance records for the plane are kept overseas, and neither the manufacturer of the jet nor U.S. regulatory authorities have the power to require that repairs be done.
Millions of Americans will find themselves on foreign-based flights this year, whether they leave from this country or transfer from a U.S. carrier to a foreign airline. Few are aware that neither the U.S. government nor any international regulatory agency regularly monitors or enforces safety standards for those foreign airlines.
That task is left to the countries in which the airlines are based. Officials of the Federal Aviation Administration emphasize that the majority of foreign airlines have impeccable safety records, some exceeding those of U.S. carriers, and there is no evidence that EgyptAir failed to maintain its jet properly.
But in some countries, operational decisions can be affected by considerations ranging from national pride to the flow of revenue that flag carriers generate. As a result, safety standards sometimes lag.
Stemming from a series of accidents in the early 1990s, the FAA established a list of more than two dozen countries whose airlines fail to meet minimum international safety standards. But the FAA still allows almost half of those countries’ airlines to continue flying to U.S. cities.
The FAA can fine American carriers that fail to comply with its orders, called airworthiness directives. Affected aircraft can be grounded, costing the airlines hundreds of thousands of dollars per plane per day.
But it has no such power to compel action by foreign airlines. And it is sometimes unaware of safety problems involving those carriers.
Neither the FAA nor the National Transportation Safety Board knew, for example, that in 1997 another EgyptAir 767 nearly lost control over Tanzania when a thrust-reverser accidentally deployed.
A thrust-reverser is a device used to slow a plane once it has landed; it is never supposed to be used in flight.
If the problem had involved a U.S.-registered airline, the carrier would have been required to file an “incident report” with the FAA, which would have launched an investigation. As it was, the EgyptAir thrust-reverser problem was first reported by the Tribune last week, based on an examination of insurance claims.
Even now, NTSB investigators are seeking to examine maintenance records of the crashed EgyptAir jet in England and Egypt for a clearer picture of the complicated history of an aircraft that had been serviced in several different countries, traversed the U.S., picked up American passengers and yet was not under the direct control of the FAA.
The FAA does conduct some inquiries overseas but not of individual airlines. Instead, it evaluates the ability of foreign countries to regulate carriers based within their borders.
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The agency has banned airlines from 14 countries from landing in the U.S. since 1992, because American authorities are unable to certify those countries are complying with international safety standards. They are Belize, Congo, Dominican Republic, Kiribati, Malta, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Gambia, Haiti, Honduras, Suriname, Swaziland, Uruguay and Zimbabwe.
Most countries belong to the International Civil Aviation Organization, commonly known as ICAO, which distributes information about safety issues and necessary repairs. Denis Chagnon, an ICAO spokesman, conceded, “There is no formal enforcement mechanism.”
“The Convention on Civil Aviation stipulates that the sovereignty of every contracting state must be protected,” he said.
FAA officials acknowledged that the agency does not have the legal authority or the personnel to certify the safety practices of the 600 foreign airlines authorized to serve U.S. cities.
“We need to reassess who is responsible for protecting the safety of the American traveling public,” concluded a report released in September by the U.S. Office of Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, which rebuked the FAA for relying on countries to police themselves.
FAA officials said the agency does perform some oversight functions of foreign carriers, requiring that all aircraft operating in U.S. airspace follow FAA flight rules and comply with inspections at U.S. airports. FAA inspectors conduct random ramp checks to ensure that foreign pilots are carrying the appropriate certificates and that “the aircraft is physically safe for flight in U.S. airspace.”
But there is no systematic evaluation of the repair history of foreign-based aircraft.
The FAA assigns a team headed by a chief inspector to the major U.S. airlines; foreign carriers have no permanently assigned inspectors. Instead, inspections of foreign craft are random, often consisting of informal cockpit checks –largely ensuring that the aircraft’s registration and maintenance logbook, and the paperwork on the crew members, are in order.
“The ramp inspections of the foreign-flag carriers are much more limited in scope and the inspectors are under pressure to go through the procedures quickly so the flights get off on time,” said a former FAA inspector at O’Hare International Airport.
More foreign-based carriers have been coming into the U.S. In the last decade, the number of foreign-based flights arriving at O’Hare has doubled. Between 1985 and 1995, the number of passengers arriving nationwide on foreign flag airlines nearly doubled to 22 million. Nearly 21 million people boarded foreign-owned planes at one of the U.S. gateway airports.
After a 1990 crash of a Colombian jet on Long Island, FAA officials sought to determine the ability of foreign countries to regulate themselves. Nearly two-thirds of the first 34 countries inspected in 1992 failed, federal records show.
The FAA has determined that airlines based in 26 countries fail to meet minimum safety standards. And while the FAA bans flights from 14 of those countries outright, the agency allows flights into this country from the other 12. They are Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Equador, Nauru, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (which encompasses Anguilla, Antiqua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Kitts and Nevis), Pakistan, Guatemala, Turks & Caico and Venezuela.
Some foreign carriers have remarkably high accident rates compared to U.S. carriers, according to research by the Department of Transportation’s inspector
general.
Over the last nine years, Korean Airlines had 11 accidents resulting in 228 passenger deaths. Delta Airlines, which once routed its passengers on to Korean Airlines jets, had six accidents, but flew four times the number of miles over the last nine years.
When potential safety problems are identified on aircraft, manufacturers issue “service bulletins,” detailing the necessary fixes.
In the U.S., the FAA has the authority to require U.S. carriers to make the repairs or stop operating the planes. So do many foreign regulatory authorities.
But aircraft manufacturers cannot compel anyone to make repairs.
“We have no authority to mandate compliance with our service bulletins,” said Lori Gunter, a spokeswoman for Seattle-based Boeing, although she said that company representatives assigned to each airline flying Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas planes likely would urge airlines to comply with the bulletins. Boeing took over McDonnell-Douglas in 1997.
The Boeing spokeswoman said the company tries to keep track of repairs it has suggested. “We do ask operators to come back and tell us when they’ve completed a repair. But it is not mandated and so we don’t have a 100 percent complete record,” she said.
In June, Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), the ranking minority member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, introduced a bill that would require the FAA to conduct safety audits as a condition of approving partnerships between U.S. and foreign carriers.