Most aviation professionals aren’t fooled by the “one level of safety” myth, the sound- bite mantra that the FAA trots out for the public, Congress and the media when a regional airline accident, like the fatal February 12 Colgan crash near Buffalo, N.Y., lays bare the truth about the disparate levels of safety between regional carriers and the majors. Like many of you, I frequently ignore the FAA’s downplaying of safety issues to the public as just another inconvenient truth the government prefers to leave unsaid.
But NBC anchor Brian Williams’s genuine shock and chagrin–when he reported that Colgan’s 20-something copilot was forced to sleep on the crew equivalent of a park bench because of low pay (something less than a stock boy at Target)–and the FAA’s stock one-level-of-safety response got me thinking about the real impact of the agency’s downplaying of safety issues to the public. In this case, its perpetuation of the canard that there’s no difference in safety levels between regional and major air carriers. Does ignoring the differences help safety? Certainly not.
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