Critical lapses in Federal Aviation Administration safety oversight of airlines : abuses of regulatory "partnership programs" : hearing before the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, second session, April 3, 2008.

Hearing to review the results of an oversight investigation. Two FAA Aviation Safety Inspectors have provided evidence raising serious questions of conduct violating the Fed. Aviation Reg¿s. (FARs) in the inspection and maint. program of Southwest Airlines (SWA). FAA employees have engaged in conduct, ¿which constitutes a violation of Fed. law, rule or reg¿n., gross mismgt., an abuse of authority and a substantial damage to public safety.¿ The Maint. Inspector for SWA knowingly allowed the airline to operate in March 2007 (and possibly beyond), and well after the inspection deadlines on a mandatory FAA Airworthiness Directive. There may be a pattern of regulatory abuse and that these regulatory lapses may be more widespread. Illustrations.

Within political and administrative sciences generally, trust as a concept is contested, especially in the field of regulatory governance. This groundbreaking book is the first to systematically explore the role and dynamics of trust within regulatory regimes.

Mena Harling learns shoddy maintenance caused ThriftJet crashes, one in which her brother died. Then a whistleblower is murdered, a note left by his corpse-Too risky to fly; deny that, you'll die; I'll watch your tears dry; your last sigh's my high. Aether. And TOETIFTSA, who desecrated Nora Kelly's church, continues killing Christians, leaving a note-Christian fundamentalism is not a righteous pursuit. So Maxine Kordell, Nora, Willi Mayers, and Haley join Mena. When Aether murders Cluster members, The Tracer asks for help, and reveals The Cluster killed Will Rogers, Amelia Earhart, and Glenn Miller. Then Aether attacks Dulles Airport and other iconic aerospace sites, as TOETIFTSA causes the crash of a plane carrying Christians, then tries to murder Nora. So Mena seeks help from a notorious serial killer, a psychiatrist living in Italy, who will profile Aether if the team agrees to a favor. Finally, events push Mena to become the determined protector of certain sociopaths just rewards.

DIV How much economic freedom is a good thing? This book tells the story of how the business community, and the trade associations and think tanks that it created, launched three powerful assaults during the last quarter of the twentieth century on the federal regulatory system and the state civil justice system to accomplish a revival of the laissez faire political economy that dominated Gilded Age America. Although the consequences of these assaults became painfully apparent in a confluence of crises during the early twenty-first century, the patch-and-repair fixes that Congress and the Obama administration put into place did little to change the underlying laissez faire ideology and practice that continues to dominate the American political economy. In anticipation of the next confluence of crises, Thomas McGarity offers suggestions for more comprehensive governmental protections for consumers, workers, and the environment. /div

An unflinching look at the unique challenges posed by complex technologies we cannot afford to let fail—and why the remarkable achievements of civil aviation can help us understand those challenges. Nuclear reactors, deep-sea drilling platforms, deterrence infrastructures—these are all complex and formidable technologies with the potential to fail catastrophically. In Rational Accidents, John Downer outlines a new perspective on technological failure, arguing that undetectable errors can lurk in even the most rigorous and “rational” assessments of these systems due to the inherent limits of engineering tests and models. Downer finds that it should be impossible, from an epistemological viewpoint, to achieve the near-perfect reliability that we require of our most safety-critical technologies. There is, however, one such technology that demonstrably appears to achieve these “impossible” reliabilities: jetliners. Downer looks closely at civil aviation and how it has reckoned with the problem of failure. He finds that the way we conceive of jetliner reliability hides the real practices by which it is achieved. And he shows us why those practices are much less transferrable across technological domains than we are led to believe. Fully understanding why jetliners don't crash, he concludes, should lead us to doubt the safety of other “ultra-reliable” technologies. A unique and sobering exploration of technological reliability from an STS perspective, Rational Accidents is essential reading for understanding why our most safety-critical technologies are even more dangerous than we believe.