Never Fear Travelers. Some In Government Want To Protect You From Gas-Passing Passengers And Foreign Mechanics

There are human activities that elected officials, try as they might, simply cannot regulate, and there are others they simply ought not regulate. Efforts to do either typically result in humorous or expensive displays of political folly.

Take, as an example of the former, the current attempt by a member of Nigeria’s Parliament, Dr. Lilian Gogo of Nairobi. She recently submitted a bill that would outlaw farting in flight. Yes, you read that correctly. Dr. Gogo wants to put an end to flatulence, at least aboard all commercial aircraft in Nigeria’s airspace, and aboard all Nigerian-certified passenger planes anywhere in the world.

It is not clear exactly how Gogo expects her proposed rule, in the seemingly unlikely event it actually gets passed into law, to be enforced. Nor is clear who would be given the unpleasant job of detecting who did it? Certainly no flight attendant would want to be a member of the fart police.

Besides, given that everyone produces between 500 and 1,500 milliliters of gastrointestinal gases every day, and that we all release it (mostly silently and odorlessly) on average around 15 times a day, a government can outlaw such activity all it wants, but it won’t stop happening, including on airplanes.

As an example of something that ought not to be regulated take a new bill authored by U.S. Rep. John Garamendi. The California Democrat has proposed a law that would require airlines to provide consumers with specific information about where and when the planes on which they’re buying tickets last underwent heavy maintenance, and that such information must be “prominently displayed” on the carrier’s websites and boarding documents. Furthermore, airport counter or gate agents would be required to communicate that information clearly to all passengers boarding that plane.

The idea, at least on the surface, might strike you as a good idea. But it’s actually a big juicy bone that the labor-friendly Garamendi is trying to throw to airline mechanics’ unions and their supporters that almost certainly would increase significantly airlines’ operating costs, and therefore ticket prices charged to consumers. And it likely would do nothing definitive to enhance safety and almost certainly would trigger some uncomfortable results and unintended consequences for travelers and workers alike.

You see, Garamendi’s proposal was written to sound like a “good governance” rule that seeks to protect travelers from the well-established practice of airlines sending at least some of their planes overseas to go through their heavy maintenance “checks.” Commercial planes are required to go through such checks every so often based on their number of hours in service, time elapsed since their last trip to the hangar, and/or their number of takeoffs and landings. Unlike cars, which typically don’t get major work done of them until something important breaks or is acting up, planes’ mechanical, electrical and hydraulic systems, and even their structural components get checked/repaired/replaced on specific schedules, ideally before those parts break, fail or act up.” Such visits to the hangar can take several weeks and cost several million dollars per plane.

Heavy maintenance is the third largest non-personnel cost center at any airline, behind only the actual purchase of planes and buying the fuel they burn in flight. Carriers are eager to find ways to do that work more cheaply without compromising safety. So, since at least the early 1990s U.S. carriers, to varying degrees, have been contracting some of that heavy maintenance work out to third party shops in foreign nations, where labor costs are much lower. For obvious reasons mechanics unions, who see “their” work being steered to competing workers paid much less don’t like that practice and long have questioned the quality of the workers and the work they perform, asserting that the practice creates a hole in U.S. aviation safety.

The problem with such claims is that the data don’t support them.

In the latest edition of the libertarian Reason Foundation’s Aviation Policy News newsletter Robert Poole, the foundation’s co-founder and director of transportation policy, calls it “A political attempt to micromanage airline maintenance,” not protect consumers.

Quoting former Federal Aviation Administration chief legal counsel Sandy Murdock, Poole notes that foreign aircraft repair stations where U.S.-certificated planes can be worked are, in fact, regulated by the FAA, except those in Europe, where Europe’s safety regulators, who are on par with their FAA counterparts, exercise oversight. Beyond that, though the practice is more than 30 years old there never has been an accident involving a U.S. aircraft attributable to bad work done – or necessary work not done – by such foreign repair stations.

To be fair, critics of the foreign outsourcing practice for years have raised legitimate concerns about the infrequency and laxity of FAA inspections at such operations overseas, the quality of training provided to at least some of the mechanics at those stations, and alleged poor oversight of such work by U.S. airlines’ representatives resident at those foreign facilities. Stories of improperly done maintenance being discovered and fixed by U.S. airlines’ own mechanics in the country have abounded for years. Yet verifiable proof of such incidents always has remained scarce. Thus, while critics of the foreign outsourcing of aircraft maintenance work may or may not valid good points, it’s hard to know because the argument is polluted by the bargaining interests and political activism of U.S. carriers’ domestic labor unions.

Thus, the actual performance data of aircraft repaired at such locations is the only reliable information to go on. And, so far, the performance of planes returning from foreign repair shops has been satisfactory. 

Proving otherwise would require the FAA to assign a significantly sized team of top-flight maintenance inspectors to spend lots and lots of time at such facilities, carefully observing and inspecting the quality of the work done there over an extended time. The FAA inspectors then would have to somehow figure out to what degree, if any, their mere presence might be influencing mechanics there to do better work than they would if the FAA inspectors weren’t present.

Given the FAA’s chronic budget and staffing limitations it’s safe to say that’s not going to happen, ever. And it’s far from clear that if it ever were to happen that the expense and trouble of doing so would yield any meaningful results.

Since disqualifying foreign repair shops for technical performance reasons is, for all practical purposes, a non-starter, Garamendi, with his bill is seeking to wipe out those foreign repair shops’ cost advantage. The obvious hope, then, is that U.S. airlines will bring their outsourced work back in-house, where their own high paid union workers would perform those duties.

So how would the reporting and disclosure requirements of Garamendi’s bill increase the cost of using foreign repair stations, beyond putting that work back into the hands of higher-paid U.S. workers? For starters it would require airlines to spend small fortunes on dramatic, cumbersome and extraordinarily complex programming changes to their internal flight operations and external seat-selling computer systems. The travel sales systems used by travel agents – online and brick-and-mortar – also would have to be reprogrammed at huge expense. You can be sure that those costs would get passed on to consumers, one way or another.

Beyond that, the complexity of disclosing such detail about the specific plane a passenger will be flying on next week, let along next month or in three months, is mind-boggling. All four this nation’s biggest airlines operate fleets with more than 700 planes. Many of them are, in fact, interchangeable, so that if one breaks down, operations teams quickly can reshuffle the deck by shifting multiple plane assignments to various flights. Eventually the broken plane will get fixed and re-inserted into service, but almost certainly on a later departing flight it previously was not scheduled to operate. Because such events happen multiple times each day its not unusual for a big airline to change airplane route assignments dozens of times each day. Bad weather that disrupts flight operations and causes massive delays, flight diversions and missed passenger connections has the same effect on a much larger scale. Thus, it’s impossible to deliver maintenance history data about a specific plane they’ll be aboard to customers buying a ticket.

And even if it were possible, its not clear that travelers would know how to understand or interpret that information. If you knew that the airplane you were flying on had not been in through a major maintenance check in the last two years would you be fearful of boarding it? What if it was just two years old and, thus, still effectively a new plane with relatively few miles and landing/takeoff cycles on it? What if it had been two years since its last big run through the hangar, but that hangar was in the U.S.: would you prefer it vs. an identical plane that just came out of a big maintenance visit to a facility somewhere in Central America or Indonesia? On which plane would you want to fly?

Few travelers have the necessary level of sophistication about aircraft operations and maintenance issues to make an well-informed decision in those cases. Thus providing them tons of aircraft maintenance information may, in fact, backfire by increasing travelers’ concerns, not minimizing them.

The bill Garamendi has proposed as a way of forcing U.S. airlines to repatriate some or all their foreign aircraft maintenance work stands to be about as effective at achieving its stated goal as Dr. Gogo’s proposal to outlaw farting in flight in Nigeria will be at achieving its stated goal. Both proposals are full of hot air: one humorously so, the other as a sadly misguided or deceitful exercise in government overreach.