FAA - AA tit for tat

It was only a matter of time for the bureaucracy to strike back at American Airlines for their claim that the inspectors and executives at the FAA reneged on a deal that would give the airline more time to fix the wiring problems with the MD-80s.

The Washington Post reports that

Maintenance work by American Airlines on hundreds of jets was so sloppy that it posed a safety risk — a lapse that forced the carrier to ground many of its planes and strand hundreds of thousands of passengers last month, according to a report by federal regulators released yesterday.

The truth is somewhere in between. Heck, AA was the one that originally wrote the service bulletins that caused the whole stir. They followed their own guidelines, but didn’t quite manage to follow the tweaks that the FAA inserted later.

There is argument about the chaos caused by the mass cancellations of flights. However, the hiccup is still reverberating through the airline this month’s on-time stats are still some of the lowest in the airline’s history — around 50 percent!

Tags: american airlines, cancellations, delays, safety