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Quo Vadis — or, Where Do We Go From Here?
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
— John Maynard Keynes
Exempting public aircraft from competent oversight may have been an innocuous concept 80 years ago. Military services were at the forefront of aviation development. Few other government aviation activities existed.10 Aviation's future lay in commercial applications. The federal government's air safety initiatives were concerned with protecting passengers traveling by commercial airplane. System safety practices lay far in the future.
Today, it's the public that needs protection from unregulated aeronautical hazards. System safety's role is to identify and control hazards before they result in losses. Few potential systemic risks have been as evident as those that have resulted from the deficit of competent oversight of public aircraft operations, yet few have been so unheeded by those in authority to mitigate them. The excuse that "The laws say…" doesn't absolve either government entities or their contractors from their responsibilities to achieve and maintain levels of guardianship for the public's safety at least equivalent to those exercised by the FAA over civil aviation.
The risks are well known. They have been demonstrated. Controls exist, exemplified by established oversight mechanisms. The challenge is whether those responsible for the public's safety will take appropriate action to protect it. If they do not, rest assured that the public will demand both answers and accountability at the first occurrence of avoidable injury to innocent persons, or damage to private property.
Copyright © 2008 by Ira J. Rimson and Ludwig Benner, Jr. All rights reserved.
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10
Even the Air Mail was originally carried by the U.S. Army Air Service. See Jamieson, C.H., On Top of the Clouds: The Story of an Airmail Pilot. XLibris, 2001.
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