Regardless of whether SWA was in the wrong with their inspections or whether the fine is inappropriate, I think a bunch of us are missing the bigger issure here, which is the FAA's change in how it handles "self-disclosure."
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of "self-disclosure" is to improve safety. If a company discovers through it's own internal auditing that it inadvertently isn't in compliance with a regulation, it discloses this info to the FAA along with a description of why it happened and what will be done to keep it from happening again. As a result of being proactive in it's compliance with regulations, a company would get a lesser penalty so it would be encouraged to self-disclose in the future. (Isn't this right? It's sorta like an ASAP or ASRS for airlines and contractors)
"Self-disclosure," as I have described above, is GOOD for safety because companies would be able to disclose processes and other types of mistakes that result in non-compliance, and the FAA and other companies in the industry could work together and share information to improve processes. Therefore, self disclosure should result in more industry-wide compliance with regulation (and theoretically, improve safety).
The problem with the $10mil fine against SWA is that SWA self-disclosed and still got slapped with a big fine! Won't this make all airlines and aviation companies... not just SWA... LESS likely to self-disclose, resulting in less information being passed around the industry, ultimately affecting safety in a negative way?
Combine this with the problems that ASAP programs just ran into a few weeks ago with the Comair crash in LEX and I'd say aviation safety, especially in relation to human factors, has taken a big step back in the last few weeks.
Is my description of self-disclosure wrong? Or are my perception of how penalties resulting from self disclosures wrong? I'm no expert on FAA enforcement issues. What do you all think?
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of "self-disclosure" is to improve safety. If a company discovers through it's own internal auditing that it inadvertently isn't in compliance with a regulation, it discloses this info to the FAA along with a description of why it happened and what will be done to keep it from happening again. As a result of being proactive in it's compliance with regulations, a company would get a lesser penalty so it would be encouraged to self-disclose in the future. (Isn't this right? It's sorta like an ASAP or ASRS for airlines and contractors)
"Self-disclosure," as I have described above, is GOOD for safety because companies would be able to disclose processes and other types of mistakes that result in non-compliance, and the FAA and other companies in the industry could work together and share information to improve processes. Therefore, self disclosure should result in more industry-wide compliance with regulation (and theoretically, improve safety).
The problem with the $10mil fine against SWA is that SWA self-disclosed and still got slapped with a big fine! Won't this make all airlines and aviation companies... not just SWA... LESS likely to self-disclose, resulting in less information being passed around the industry, ultimately affecting safety in a negative way?
Combine this with the problems that ASAP programs just ran into a few weeks ago with the Comair crash in LEX and I'd say aviation safety, especially in relation to human factors, has taken a big step back in the last few weeks.
Is my description of self-disclosure wrong? Or are my perception of how penalties resulting from self disclosures wrong? I'm no expert on FAA enforcement issues. What do you all think?