Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure chairman, recently sent a letter to Inspector General Calvin Scovel III calling for an audit of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) oversight of aeronautical repair stations.
These repairs are increasingly outsourced to repair stations throughout the country, but only 729 FAA inspectors with dedicated to overseeing the stations.
The stations have been linked to airline accidents. Lion Air flight 610, which crashed last year, was improperly maintained at a repair station in Florida. Between 2013 and 2017, 88 used airplanes of unknown airworthiness were added to the Southwest Airlines fleet.
DeFazio requested an audit addressing five questions, concerning how often FAA inspectors physically observe work conducted at repair stations, how many times annually FAA inspectors visit single repair stations and is this sufficient, to what extent the FAA implemented the inspector general’s recommendations on repair station oversight, if FAA management pressure inspectors to initiate compliance actions rather than enforcement actions, and if the FAA effectively implemented a risk-based oversight model.
Last week, DeFazio introduced H.R. 5119 that would require the FAA to take specific steps to improve its oversight of repair stations.
The bill was advanced by the committee Wednesday.