NTSB Should Be An Informational Agency, Not a Political One

I was watching something on the Discovery Channel about air disasters. The NTSB was piping in as to how the flaws were known. Legislation had been passed and airlines were phasing usage out.

Then the director showed that while airlines were "phasing it out," the military had already removed the flaw from its entire fleet, grounding those planes it didn't have the funding to upgrade.

And it struck me that the airlines are too slow.

This isn't a new critique. Almost every show you see on airline disasters has a slew of people pissed at the airlines for moving so slowly. And the airlines always have people to tell us that their fleets are massive and that they will go out of business if they have to upgrade for every single safety flaw.

I agree with both sides.

Airlines are slow.

And in America, land of the free, airlines should have the right to build whatever sort of plane they want. Flier beware.

But we don't want to beware. We want the NTSB to protect us so we can be lazy.

Fine. I'm OK with that approach too.

What I disagree with is the way that the NTSB does its job. They're essentially a scientific political organization. They have brilliant scientists who figure out what's unsafe with planes... or what could make them safer. And they have politicians who try to get laws passed to force airlines to implement those brilliant ideas. No sarcasm here... they are good ideas and they could make travel safer.

But because they implement their plan in a political environment they always have to compromise. It's the nature of politics.

But physics doesn't compromise. And this is how you get tragic accidents.

The NTSB should keep doing what it's doing from a scientific perspective. But it should stop worrying about laws. In a market-driven economy they should become distributors of information.

What if you could see all of the outstanding unimplemented safety fixes that the NTSB has recommended for the exact plane that you want to take to Hawaii for your vacation?

What if you could compare planes across carriers to find ones that have a particular safety measure implemented?

What if you could see all routine maintenance records for an airplane?

What if hedge funds were created to predict airline disasters and the current status of the funds were visible for each plane when you made a reservation?

It's not that far-fetched. Sites like Travelocity.com already allow you to see the model and year of the plane you're going to fly on. The airlines are already required to keep data on each plane. By comparing it to a database of NTSB "issues" you could easily do all of these things.

NTSB would keep all of its scientists, get rid of some of its lobbyists and hire some new technology punks. These tech punks would have the challenge of creating systems that allow for the distribution of information to the public and to the airline industry. Some legislation would be required at first to jumpstart the information visibility.

Technologies like web logging and RSS would be perfect tools to craft such a system. Imagine how quickly airlines would upgrade when people stopped flying that 707 with the "old" wiring.

They key here is that suddenly the safety element would go from being hidden to being visible. This visiblity would create a market more efficient at solving the safety problem.

Right now, without knowing it, we, the market... the users of airline services... have allowed a system that focuses on political factors more than safety factors. Airlines have little incentive to get safe. Even if they do everything the NTSB wants they won't make any more money because we, the market, won't know about it.

There needs to be a better exchange of information in the safety industry.

Creating this market in safety would be expensive. And we'd bear the expense... if we wanted to. It would cost airlines money to upgrade and that cost would be passed on to us. To fly the safe airlines we'd pay more... maybe double or triple... that what we pay today.

Would it be worth it?

This is the point I love: it's America so you get to decide!! We're the land of the free.

Want to take the risk and fly on that old rickety plane without the upgraded wires? You'll save a hundred bucks but you may end up dead. Do your homework and take the risk. Your call. Have a blast. Set up a family meeting, have a vote and go for it!

Risk is monetized and transferred in every industry. IT managers have the rough task of figuring out the subtle balance between uptime and cost. Mechanics calculate the risk between factory-made parts and wholesalers. We decide whether we want generic drugs or name brand.

But we can't make informed decisions about air travel... not to the level of detail that the current available data would allow. The NTSB is part of our government... so we own its data... why can't we use it?

There's certainly the chance that we'd all decide air travel is safe enough as it is now and opt for the "unsafe" planes to save some money. In this case the safety of the industry wouldn't move ahead substantially.

And I'm fine with that... because we, the market, would be in control. As it stands today our safety is determined by some black magic in Washington, DC. We can't choose safer planes. All planes are treated equally. But they're not equal. Do your research and you'll find that some are statistically safer than others.

Anyhow, I have no interest in persuing this line of action right now. If it's up your alley, go for it.

Planes are a hell of a lot safer than cars already so I'm fairly comfortable with them. I just don't like the system that's used to define what's safe enough.

And if you are, or want to be President of the United States, just install me to run the NTSB and I'll make all of this happen lickety split. No Xxxt.

And my standard disclaimer that I'm an armchair analyst (a poor one at that) and don't really know anything about the airline industry... except that they seem to have moved from peanuts to pretzels as in-flight snacks.