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Airline safety under the microscope
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Not everyone agrees that there should be safety concerns.
“Nobody wants to fly an unsafe airplane,” says Ed Perkins, contributing editor to SmarterTravel.com. “The idea that airlines in the U.S. are cutting corners on safety to save a few bucks is simply not correct.”
Perkins does believe that with so many domestic airlines outsourcing their maintenance departments to other companies there may be a bigger need for oversight. “But there is no evidence that they are unsafe. Put that to rest now.”
After the Sept. 11th tragedy, and the airlines' financial problems that followed, carriers stepped up their efforts to outsource maintenance to third parties in the United States, Asia and Latin America. This created a situation where the lines of communication between the FAA and maintenance organizations were more far flung, says Jerry Chandler, a blogger for CheapFlights.com and the former contributing editor of Frequent Flyer magazine.
But that doesn’t mean, he maintains, that safety went out the window. “The system is self-correcting,” he explains. “What’s happening on the Hill today is absolutely healthy so that the system continues to self correct.”
“Thank God,” he adds, “this corrective action taken is not of a nature that anyone has died or has been injured recently. Commercial aviation in this country is as safe as any system could possibly be.”
Kate Hanni with the Coalition for Passenger Rights doesn’t buy it.
“They’re doing everything they can to save money,” she says about the airlines.
“The infrastructure of our air travel system is like the Minnesota bridge collapse, it’s eroding and there is a callous disregard for safety of airline passengers,” she says. “There’s going to be a disaster. We have to do something now.”
Aside from safety concerns, what will it mean for airfares and air travel disruptions?
Airfares, already rising thanks to higher fuel costs, probably won’t be impacted by the recent plane groundings, says Phil Baggaley, airline industry analyst for Standard & Poor’s.
But expect more delays and cancellations in the short-term, contends Gritta. “It’s going to create a backlash,” he adds, with more questions about whether all the U.S. airline carriers’ planes are safe.
The good news: “We’ll see an increase in safety because the FAA will have to get off its tush.”
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