ISO Worried
Rodin’s The Thinker contemplating ISO 9001
Mark Twain, writer and humorist, once said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.” In April 2008, there was a Congressional Aviation Safety Oversight Hearing where government officials testified about “… the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] oversight of [aircraft] maintenance operations.” The focus was on improving safety at the FAA, but soon descended into a partisan circus where Representatives Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and the late Elijah Cummings (D-MD) used the hearing for attacking political opponents.
The two politicians, upset with the FAA’s term ‘Customer Service Initiative’ (CSI), questioned FAA Associate Administrator and top Flight Standards Division official, Nicholas Sabatini about the CSI and problems at an airline. Mr. Sabatini, who oversaw every FAA aviation safety inspector (ASI), was a senior manager fully engaged in the FAA’s day-to-day. Unfortunately, the two politicians’ ignorance and a compliant media’s naiveite turned the inquiry into anything but a safety hearing.
A year earlier (2007), Mr. Sabatini mandated the FAA adopt the ISO 9001 quality system, aligning the globally recognized standard for quality management into FAA culture. This was rare for a government agency to employ an effective discipline focused on quality. With ISO 9001, safety would evolve and cultivate a safety-minded environment inside the FAA. ISO 9001 brought consistency that gave all FAA offices a continually improving safety structure.
What is ISO 9001? Per the Lead Auditor training guidelines, “It is a standard produced by the International Organization for Standardization. Implementing ISO 9001 helps organizations to consistently provide products and services that meet customer requirements and applicable laws and regulations.” It was the word ‘customer’ in CSI that confused the congressmen, who refused to educate themselves. CSI didn’t redefine aviation certificate holders as customers. ISO 9001 was designed for product or service businesses; it used the term ‘customer’ in its training. Under ISO 9001, the FAA was improving quality internally; self-auditing to correct deficiencies. Then the FAA would work with certificate holders to improve their safety cultures with the tools and experience necessary to help build their own top-down, ever-evolving safety philosophies. The FAA was using ISO 9001 to provide consistency and quality for its certificate holders, to provide the best guidance.
What was the significance of the FAA’s own quality control? Consider preflight briefings we receive before any flight. The flight attendant advises those traveling with small children to don their oxygen mask first before helping the child with theirs. Allowing for the metaphor (no one suggests an airline is a small child) the certificate holders are the FAA’s charges. In order to assist them, to guide them, the FAA MUST understand its own weaknesses; MUST correct its deficiencies; MUST be at the FAA’s best to provide quality oversight, guidance, and – to be honest – integrity to those in the industry, e.g., pilots, mechanics, flight attendants, controllers, who should feel safe reporting unsafe conditions.
However, DeFazio and Cummings missed the point; they killed ISO 9001; they were responsible for its failure and resulting consequences. By forcing Sabatini to leave the FAA before the ISO 9001 project began, the FAA lost its rudder. Ironically, safety improvements the two congressmen whined about in the 2008 hearing were now about to go full throttle forward. However, without Sabatini’s commitment, the ISO 9001 qualification fell to lower FAA management, who feared for their agendas. Internal resistance (not from the ASI workforce) from FAA senior management slowly smothered ISO 9001.
In the beginning, ISO 9001 worked great. While FAA offices began to align with each other, certificate holders’ cultures became safer. Industry saw this. Each FAA internal audit increased FAA consistency in regulation enforcement. ASIs used FAA-issued guidance and orders more effectively. The FAA presented a united front with less confusion between FAA offices.
Could ISO 9001 work in a government environment? Yes, but government isn’t like business. There are more opportunities for corruption, such as favoritism, kingdom-building, incompetence, inexperience, political influence in management. Personal agendas muddy the waters; power plays obstruct progress; sycophancy creates distrust. Unlike a business, mistakes and incompetence aren’t obvious because there’s no financial bottom line, no customer feedback or satisfaction. If a manager’s division implodes, he adds more incompetence, builds more tiers, or blames someone else. Managers can also discredit the analysis project that spotlights their incompetencies, in this case: ISO 9001 audits.
The ISO 9001 program employed regular audits of each FAA office, once every three years. I worked these audits for over a decade; I saw many office managers who welcomed an outside perspective, while other office managers purposely sabotaged their office’s audits. These latter managers spent more time and energy fighting improvements that made their jobs easier and, as a result, aviation safer. Some Regional managers also confounded the ISO 9001 process at their level.
For ISO 9001 to succeed, upper management must buy in 130% because safety cultures work from management down through the ranks – not the other way. FAA upper management had to provide any needed resources and the commitment to keep the FAA focused top to bottom on safety, on providing the aviation industry with consistent quality support and guidance. With the CØVID shutdowns, the forced absence of regular audits gave FAA management their excuse to end (prematurely) its only improvement system. By allowing its ISO 9001 qualification to implode, FAA management failed the aviation industry, the FAA ASI workforce, and the travelling public.
By 2020, there was a deficit of common sense; any quality approach was shelved. Group think filled the vacuity introduced by ‘Acting’ senior management’s actions or, better stated – inactions. Group think is defined as: “… a phenomenon that occurs when a group of individuals reach a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the consequences or alternatives.” Group think took hold while regular political games, like the continuing resolutions, played out. FAA integrity suffered; seen as increasingly irrelevant through every government shutdown, the FAA was viewed as inconsequential; after all, flights took off and landed with or without the FAA. But aviation did suffer because the FAA’s mission as a regulator was misunderstood.
Cartoonist A.F. Branco illustrates how DEI destroys industry with ignorance
Group think allowed radical ideas to infect the FAA. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) became the virus within the FAA and many airlines in the industry. DEI whittled away at safety by introducing incompetence, inexperience, a lack of knowledge into management, the workforce, and FAA oversight.
Where is the industry today? 265-pound tires falling off wide body airliners during climb; Boeing’s MAX contracting problems and Quality Control failures; Pratt and Whitney’s PW1100G 30-month engine recalls; and more. This isn’t stopping; it will get worse because FAA management let DEI get out of control. Meanwhile, FAA management dodges the media (they’ve been quiet) so the media fills the void by reporting every implausible event they can make up. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) can’t (won’t?) do its job and uses social media to advertise its incompetence. Serious aviation professionals shake their heads wondering, “How did aviation safety get this bad?”
FAA Management surrenders to the incompetence of DEI
Is FAA management to blame for what’s happening? In part. Most culpable are DEI principles fostered in the commonsense vacuum when feelings replaced facts. DEI began its poisoning during the CØVID craziness when ‘Acting’ FAA Administrators, who bore none of their agendas’ blame nor responsibility for the consequences, bought into DEI principles and pressed them onto the FAA’s hiring practices.
Cartoonist A. F. Branco illustrates an accurate industry reaction to DEI principles
In lockstep, aviation certificate holders jumped on the DEI bandwagon. In 2021, United Airlines advertised: “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” Insanity! Were DEI employees part of the interview process? Other major carriers took up the DEI chant. DEI can be defined: experience, skill, knowledge, are less important than race or gender; the facts bear this out. Questions: Using facts, how does one equate skill with race or gender? Equate experience with race or gender? Equate knowledge with race or gender? Where are these discriminations? In 40 years, I never saw these alleged discriminations in the cockpits I flew in; flight lines I worked on; certificates I surveilled. Racism or gender discrimination in aviation has been a falsehood.
How did group think and the demise of the FAA’s ISO 9001 qualification affect industry? The FAA’s use of DEI destroyed quality-mindedness and quality training. 100% teleworking made FAA oversight and surveillance non-existent. The FAA training Academy has inexperienced course mentors writing courses. So, the questions are: What are absent ASIs missing? Has the FAA lost sight of international certificate holders? Who writes the FAA Academy training courses? What qualifications does FAA’s upper management have? How does the FAA guarantee its own quality?
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, DEI promoter
What needs to be distinctly understood: the Boeing door, numerous United Airlines maintenance and operational problems, the Pratt and Whitney PW1100G engine, Spirit AeroSystem’s lack of quality control, lost installation records, the failure of proper oversight … these are all symptoms. They’re not root causes but parts of larger problems within our aviation industry. When we focus on these symptoms, causes aren’t addressed and safety remains elusive. What is more infuriating is these are events the foolish media obsesses about. The ‘news’ sources and social media ‘experts’ are responsible for distracting necessary attention and professional analysis away from the root causes and into entropy, away from fundamental truths the industry needs to know.
What fundamental truths? As manufacturers, air operators, repair stations, regulators, we have failed, not just ourselves, but the traveling public and their confidence in safe air travel. We have allowed irrefutable truths and facts to be usurped by selfish feelings and opinions. People who employ per the arrogance of self-aggrandizement are demonizing the hiring of professionals with experience, knowledge and skill.
The FAA became an impotent shadow of its former self due to leadership failures; the airlines’ upper management have surrendered to DEI stupidity; air traffic controllers are being deprived of necessary training and experience; the NTSB’s aerospace division makes headlines for late reports and whining about what it refuses to control; and the Secretary of Transportation hasn’t anything to brag of beyond the absurd. Who are the victims? Children, parents, grandparents, any innocent traveler who boards any major airline’s jet and are put at risk.
What Mark Twain was trying to communicate was being in the majority is not always a good thing, especially where group think is concerned. This is our fault. Safety is our responsibility. I report my observations; I teach facts about regulations and safety to aviation trainees. It’s a start. We must take action to get aviation back on track, to make it safe again. The air traffic near misses, baffling pilot errors, increasing maintenance problems, training inadequacies, FAA’s failure to move past CØVID and return to self-auditing … are all unacceptable. The consequences of inaction are too awful to imagine.