Compliance… Safety’s Friend… or Foe?

The 2013 Asiana Airline’s accident in San Francisco offered a number of lessons for those of us in the transportation business.

Miraculously there were only 3 deaths. All were students who were thrown from the plane. Every passenger who remained within the fuselage survived. Just as in motorcoach accidents, keeping folks inside greatly improves their chances. Seatbelts worked here.

There were other, perhaps more obscure, things we can learn from this crash and its aftermath.

As long as I can remember, whenever there was a major accident, the federal authorities were reluctant to divulge information until the investigation was complete. One reason for this is that, in addition to any quickly discovered facts, there is often a context that has impact (pardon the pun), and it takes a while to fully understand it.

In this case there was a rush to the media with preliminary conclusions. Facts were transmitted, without putting them in perspective. Their reasoning is obscure, but could part of it be an effort to make the regulators appear visible and relevant?

It was quickly noted that the pilots had minimal actual experience on this aircraft model. What seems to be coming out later, and more quietly, was that the airline was generally in compliance with regulations.

Golly gee... maybe part of the context is that the rules in place were either ill-conceived or irrelevant.
Some sources have indicated that Asiana was training pilots to pass required tests, rather than deal with the real world.

Maybe it’s me, but aren’t there some parallels here to what we’re seeing in FMCSA’s aggressive compliance push?

First, is there a problem? Asiana sure had one, but are there statistics that show that the motorcoach industry has a growing safety problem? Obviously perfection is a lofty goal, but what if the pursuit wrecks an industry that is already performing well? (Driving people into cars that are more polluting and less safe).

Until Asiana’s boo-boo, airlines had been near perfect for years, but airplanes don’t travel roads surrounded by drivers of dubious competence. Last time I checked, pilots made more money than bus drivers (hence airlines can be a bit pickier in hiring)

Is there a demonstrated connection between what they’re measuring and safety? There probably is an association between some of the categories and real world safety, but which ones?

Currently we are unavoidably acting the same way Asiana might have… complying at great expense with regulations that may have only a fleeting acquaintance with real safety. It’s akin to students memorizing things to pass a test, without really understanding its meaning.

How is it that several companies have been declared “imminent dangers” shortly after good reviews? Please understand, some were troubled operators, but what of the officials that rated them “satisfactory”? What were they measuring?

It’s anecdotal, but it seems that most of the companies on bussy death row are relatively small, lacking resources to contest regulators. Is that by design?

We haven’t yet seen a GBB (Great Big Busline) truly hammered. Certainly disrupting one of them would create major heartburn for the traveling public… but are they really safer, or simply “too big to fail”?

If the goal is to protect the MOST passengers, isn’t this where a watchdog can get the most bang for their buck? One executive (and wiseacre) said “Regulators don’t practice actuarial science, they practice political science”.

Whether planned, or as an unforeseen effect, the cost of compliance is making it increasingly difficult for small and midsized operators to survive. The likely result is a smaller industry with some GBB’s becoming “too big to fail”. That may benefit them, but the traveling public and the nation will be hurt.

It bears repeating from an earlier scribbling… GBB’s should be careful what they wish for, because if they get it, they could end up in the same place as the private transit operators in ye olden days.

My friend (the wiseacre) says “It should be of particular interest to a ton of operators (1,300 of them) is that many are facing a new type of Compliance Review.  It’s interesting that the FMCSA defends its new CSA and SMS programs at every turn, and promotes its SaferBus app in press releases it puts out about shutting down some company.”

“At the same time, and out of the other side of its mouth, it admits it doesn't even have enough information on more than one-third of ALL Motorcoach operators to assign BASIC scores.”  

Regulators often make the point that they’re there to help us, to improve the industry. Certainly they’re correct in assuming that safety is good for business. But the folks doing enforcement, for the most part have little understanding of the nuts and bolts of transportation, and aren’t really accountable for mistakes they make. We, and the public, pay for their errors.

In a final comparison with the Asiana tragedy… there were only 3 deaths, but one of them was a young woman who was run over by a rescue vehicle coming to “help” her.