Safety Board Has No Teeth
NTSB can only recommend; it can't order
Plain Dealer – February 28, 1993
SERIES: DEADLY DELAYS: RED TAPE COSTS LIVES
(Part one of a five-part series)
by KEITH EPSTEIN
PLAIN DEALER BUREAU
WASHINGTON
Most Americans have heard of the National Transportation Safety Board. After an accident, its experts comb for clues, address the press, discover what went wrong and what should be done to prevent it from happening again.
What Americans don’t see is the NTSB for what it is – a toothless tiger.
The safety board, one of the federal government’s smallest entities, is powerless to require changes that would make the nation’s highways, railroads, airways or shipping lanes safer. Congress made it that way in 1974, hoping an independent watchdog would prod existing agencies into action.
Thus the safety board makes suggestions in line with its mission to help “reduce the likelihood of recurrence of … accidents.”
Behind the scenes, NTSB officials plead with agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration to adopt its recommendations. Safety board and FAA officials exchange letters, share studies and testify before Congress.
Yet even when it matters most, the safety board sometimes fails in the mission lawmakers gave it nearly two decades ago – to help “reduce the likelihood of recurrence of … accidents.”
Federal agencies have acted on only two of 18 safety improvements identified by the safety board in 1990 as the nation’s most urgently needed to save nearly 3,000 lives each year. The 18 were culled from hundreds of staff suggestions.
Of the two enacted, one involved detecting pilots with alcohol or drug problems. A requirement for a device warning commuter airliners when they are too close to the ground won’t take effect for at least two years.
Among the 16 disregarded suggestions: Ground radar systems to prevent planes from colliding on airport taxiways, better testing of aging jets for structural fatigue and better fire detection in cruise ships.
Also disregarded were suggestions about strengthening railroad cars carrying hazardous materials, improved braking on commercial airplanes and a crackdown on truck accidents caused by drivers on alcohol and drugs.
The safety board’s recommendations usually are ignored because it commands little respect where needed most – elsewhere in government. Experienced agency hands dismiss the NTSB as “a think tank” or “ivory tower” whose idealists are unfettered by practical concerns.
“Now that I’m over here,” said former NTSB investigator William R. Hendricks, now an FAA official, “I see … you have to maintain a precarious balance between safety and economics. We have to satisfy the industry.”
Though responsible for conducting thousands of sophisticated investigations, the safety board has no lab of its own. Instead, it sometimes uses labs of airline manufacturers, prompting accusations of conflicts or conspiracies.
The safety board also is outgunned by business interests opposed to its suggestions. One lobby, the American Trucking Associations, has an annual budget nearly equal to NTSB’s $36 million a year.
Moreover, many agencies are reluctant to require anything, let alone follow a recommendation from the safety board. In recent years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – fearing lawsuits from industry – has all but abandoned regulation for recalls.
While lacking in real authority, NTSB officials often find comfort in a frequent refrain within their ranks – that they “regulate by raised eyebrow.”
Safety board officials like to emphasize that of the more than 9,000 suggestions, agencies have adopted four of every five.
They rarely boast of the average time it takes – 3 years.
That’s hardly what the board means in an official publication stressing that with human lives at stake “timeliness is essential.”
Agencies, which hold little respect for the NTSB, rarely provide even cursory initial replies to the board’s recommendations within the 90 days required by law. On average, first replies from the Coast Guard on shipping mishaps take more than three years.
Records indicate the NTSB continues to wait for an answer from a recommendation so old it was addressed to the Civil Aeronautics Board, which went out of business eight years ago.
