FAA ignored problems: report

Two safety inspectors with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the agency regularly pressured safety inspectors to ignore violations and punished those who persisted in filing negative reports on an airline, CBS News reported.

The inspectors, each with a decade of experience with the FAA and who spoke with the TV network on the condition of anonymity, said managers pressured inspectors like them to ignore vital safety issues such as corrosion or ensuring companies doing business with commercial airlines followed FAA rules.

"I had reports that I had entered into our database one day," one of the inspectors told CBS in its report on Wednesday. "One day, (they) were there and the next morning, they're gone."

The FAA declined an on-camera interview with the network, but in a statement said federal regulators have a "comprehensive safety oversight system that encourages the sharing of information to identify problems and ensure they are fixed."

The FAA noted that "the US aviation system has a safety record that is unprecedented in history" with only one domestic death in the past ten years."

A 2016 Inspector General's report found concerns similar to those the two inspectors told CBS about.

Charles Banks, an FAA inspector, said he was pressured to back off on a negative report of an airline and then management punished him. Contacted by CBS News, Banks said he had been disciplined for filing a negative report on Miami Air International, a charter service with government contracts valued at about $200 million over the last five years.

Earlier this month, one of Miami Air International's charter flights carrying US troops from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, crash landed in Jacksonville, Florida. No one was killed in the mishap and the cause is not yet known. CBS said the airline declined to comment.

In 2015, the FAA adopted a compliance program based on "mutual cooperation" with airlines rather than a "traditional enforcement-focused regulatory model," the network reported.

Since adoption of the compliance model, enforcement actions such as fines and penalties fell by 70 percent between 2014 and 2017, the network reported.

One of the inspectors told CBS, "We're on the verge of an issue happening. We're talking about a crash inside the United States borders." The inspector said the FAA should serve the public, but noted that his superiors sometimes refer to airlines as "customers" or "stakeholders."

Asked if there are US airlines that should be grounded, one of the inspectors told CBS, "I think there's a few airlines out there we need to take a hard look at doing that to."