Aviation Safety Under Threat From Poor Oversight and Outsourcing: CLAMOR for Reform!
Courageous FAA inspectors are coming forward April 3 to tell the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure how Southwest Airlines, in collusion with FAA management, refused to perform necessary maintenance. Southwest kept planes with cracked fuselages in the air, even when told to ground them by FAA inspectors.
The problem doesn’t stop with Southwest, as the sudden grounding of hundreds of flights across major airlines demonstrates. The cause? As experts across the industry emphasized at the first-ever Aircraft Maintenance Outsourcing Summit (AMOS) in February, our nation’s entire system for overseeing aircraft maintenance is dysfunctional and dangerous. A key problem: crucial aircraft repairs are outsourced domestically and to countries like China and El Salvador – and the FAA’s outdated oversight system can’t keep pace. Rear-guard actions by airlines and discredited FAA management shouldn’t fool anyone: we need aggressive reform to fix this dangerous mess!
The Teamsters have joined with the Business Travel Coalition to lead CLAMOR (the Coalition to Legislate Aircraft Maintenance Outsourcing Reform). We will monitor the Congressional hearings and fight until we get real reforms. Join us in this fight!
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