Silent Skies: The FAA Tries to Fire a Safety Inspector for Speaking to Mother Jones.
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While Block’s reasons for framing Gonzales are understandable, FAA’s eagerness to play along is simply baffling.
Two weeks after I visited TIMCO, the company’s vice president for regulatory compliance, David Latimer, sent the FAA a letter expressing his “deep concern” over Gonzales’ conduct. “At no time was the observer identified as a member of the media,” he wrote, though this is blatantly untrue. Much of the language in TIMCO’s letter reappears almost verbatim in the official FAA letter proposing to fire Gonzales. Interestingly, the FAA official who received TIMCO’s letter gave it the handwritten notation “CONSUMER COMPLAINT,” lest anyone think that the FAA exists to serve the flying public.
Indeed, reading the investigation file it’s sometimes hard to tell who is the regulator and who is the regulated. TIMCO’s letter informs the FAA that “as a direct result of this situation,” the company was implementing emergency changes to prevent further problems, and would henceforth administer “proper scrutiny of official credentials.” In his letter to Gonzales, the FAA manager frets about “the reputation of the agency.” “[N]o one can predict what far reaching effects your actions will have as TIMCO shares this information within the aviation community, “ he writes.
None of what I am saying here about my dealings with Mike Gonzales will be news to the FAA. I put it all in writing to Gonzales’ manager, Kenneth Reilly, last May. But it wasn’t until August that I was finally interviewed by their internal affairs investigator, who didn't ask me any questions about the information I had provided. When I asked about this, the agent told me that had never been given a copy of my letter to Reilly. When the interview concluded, I was told that I would receive a copy of my testimony for my review and approval within a matter of days. This never happened, and I never heard from the FAA again.
Michael Block, on the other hand, was re-interviewed not long after I was. Responding to the information I had given FAA, Block said that the “I’ll get shot” conversation “did not happen. I have never told them that or anything that resembles that,” and that “I did not tell them [that he would need permission from his managers to talk to the press] and I did not express that in any way.” When informed by the FAA agent that this conversation had been tape recorded, Block said such a tape would prove his story.
On January 18, Reilly again informed Gonzales in writing that he hoped to fire him within 30 days. After the 15-month investigation, the accusations against him remained essentially unchanged: the assertions from TIMCO are accepted as fact, while those of the only person to accompany Gonzales are essentially discarded. Reading Reilly’s letter, one could get the impression that I’d refused to cooperate with the investigation.
Reilly’s latest letter does add some new accusations: if true, Gonzales may have filled out his time cards incorrectly on the days we were together. But Reilly is clearly not referring to paperwork infractions when he writes, “your ten years of service cannot overcome the severity of your conduct.” FAA’s case against Gonzales is built around Block’s statements to the agency and to his own superiors that Gonzales had, unbeknownst to him, snuck a reporter from Mother Jones into TIMCO’s repair station. These statements are provably false, as I have been telling the FAA since last May.
Ironically, one of the main points of the article Jim Morris and I wrote was that FAA, facing serious budget constraints, was shrinking the nation’s inspector workforce to a potentially unsafe level. FAA responded by placing this veteran safety inspector on administrative leave more than eight months ago, during which time the flying public has continued paying his $100,000-a-year salary while receiving nothing in return. But then, the flying public isn’t the FAA’s “consumer.” By firing Mike Gonzales based on statements they know to be false, the FAA will be demonstrating the truth of the old adage: The “consumer” is always right.
Everybody knows the captain lied."
leonard Cohen
Why does this article not surprise me?