RPT: Federal Air Safety Program Falling Short, Needs to be Fixed
It’s supposed to be making flying safer, but a new report has found that an FAA program that encourages air traffic controllers to fess up to their mistakes -- like falling asleep on the job -- is falling short on the failure to properly analyze, share or even verify the accuracy of the information.
Former NTSB official John Goglia told Bill Hemmer that while the system of reporting sleeping on the job is very successful, the FAA is not properly following up. Goglia said, “We need to understand why they [workers] are falling asleep. There's scheduling issues, there’s all sorts of issues and unless we take a scientific approach to analyzing the events, we’re never going to get to the root cause and we’re never going to be able to fix it.”
Goglia said he’s very discouraged by the FAA's failure to analyze all the reports. “The airlines are required to do their own analysis, but here the FAA in their own operation isn’t performing the same tasks they require others to do. So, right off the bat the system is flawed by their own hands.”
He thinks the problem is much bigger than people realize because “the human body wants to sleep at night.”
