Let’s promote the guy who blew it

Posted by Marc Hodak on April 10, 2008 under Invisible trade-offs | 2 Comments to Read

We’ve continually seen cases of a government agency that has failed using that failure as an excuse for more money and more power. I should name this the MM/MP phenomenon as a short-cut, since it’s the most common thing heard from government agencies. The current example is Congress considering expanding the budget and mandate of a Federal Airline Administration that is already largely ineffective and unnecessary.

The main premise of the FAA is that the government cares more about your safety than the airlines that serve you, as if the airlines were indifferent to the prospect of killing some of its customers and frightening the rest away. For anyone who thinks the FAA can do as good a job as the airlines themselves in monitoring safety, consider this comment from someone in a position to compare government versus private airline inspectors:

As a company that is a supplier and maintenance provider to airlines we are frequently audited by both the FAA and the QC departments of airlines. In general the airlines auditors are better, more thorough, and stricter, but at the same time more fair and consistent. Not being restricted to the “letter of the law” they can be flexible in areas where it makes sense and putative on issues that may not be technical failings but would cause problems. The airlines QC departments also act pretty independently and don’t seem to mind calling attention to an issue even if they know it will cause delays or hassles on the operations side. The FAA provides more of a bureaucratic hurdle, and from what I see makes decisions as seemingly arbitrary as that traffic cop. We recently had new inspectors for our district rotate in, and now we are enduring shut down threats over procedures that were fine for the previous 4 years under our old inspectors.”

I think most people would prefer dealing with a private company rather than the government, and would trust private companies to do better job than government. Unfortunately, the ones who don’t tend to run for office.