Silent Skies: The FAA Tries to Fire a Safety Inspector for Speaking to Mother Jones.
News: Tape excerpts prove that the FAA’s action is baseless—and that the industry's image comes before the flying public’s safety.
January 26, 2007
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When Jim Morris and I began writing Waiting to Happen, Mother Jones' July 2006 feature story about the Federal Aviation Administration handing its henhouse keys to the aviation industry foxes, we hoped that our efforts might prod the FAA into taking some sort of action. We didn’t have to wait long. Even before the article was published, FAA had begun trying to fire one of our sources, Safety Inspector Mike Gonzales. If the agency gets its way, Gonzales, who was put on administrative leave last May, will see his ten-year career there come to an end next month.
The FAA has been investigating Gonzales for 15 months, and although the charges against him—made by companies the agency is supposed to be regulating—have been accepted as true, the agency has apparently decided to disregard the testimony of Gonzales’ principal exculpatory witness: me.
Gonzales is being persecuted not because of the information he shared, but rather the methods he allegedly employed in sharing it. In order to show Mother Jones what an Aviation Safety Inspector’s job entails, Gonzales arranged for me to accompany him on unofficial “mock inspections” of two aircraft repair companies. Those companies approved the visits in advance, but now claim that they did not know I was a reporter, and that Gonzales tricked them into believing we were there on official business. As far as they knew, they now say, I was “an individual who was helping the FAA gather data on surveillance methodology.” These claims are, to put it bluntly, absolutely, outrageously false.
In addition to being a safety inspector, Mike Gonzales is a national assistant for the Professional Airways Systems Specialists, the safety inspectors’ union. FAA had barred its officials from speaking with Mother Jones for this story, but could not prevent us from speaking with PASS officials as long as it was clear that they were speaking on behalf of PASS, not the FAA. FAA’s letter proposing to fire Gonzales accuses him of helping Mother Jones “in order to further your own personal agenda, and that of the PASS union.” In fact, we turned to Gonzales because most other FAA employees had been gagged by the agency.
In October 2005, Gonzales and I drove to the Phoenix-Goodyear Municipal Airport in Arizona to visit TIMCO, one of the nation’s largest repair stations. We were met by Michael Block, TIMCO’s Director of Quality, who was expecting us and who described Gonzales to me as a “friend.” Gonzales introduced me as a journalist for Mother Jones and himself as the PASS Flight Standards National Assistant. At the time, this struck me as an awkward and somewhat silly way to greet a longtime acquaintance, but it was Gonzales’ way of making clear that he was not there on official business. Block led us to TIMCO’s massive, 250,000 square-foot hangar, then returned to his office, leaving Gonzales free to show me what it is an inspector does.
One thing an FAA inspector does is spot screw-ups that endanger public safety, and it wasn’t long before Gonzales zeroed in on a pair of improperly labeled oxygen canisters—you may remember these as the cause of the 1996 ValuJet crash that killed 110 people. Canisters in hand, Gonzales approached a manager on the hangar on the floor. But before alerting him to the problem, he introduced me: “Roger, this is Frank. He’s a reporter. He’s following me around doing an article on what aviation inspectors do. And look what we found…”(Click here to listen.) Yet FAA continues to insist that Gonzales lied about my identity to TIMCO’s employees.
When confronted with the mislabeled canister, the TIMCO manager promised to take care of it. Yet in the FAA’s official letter proposing to fire him, Gonzales’ manager Kenneth Reilly chastises him for having “noted findings and requested responses for the findings” while at TIMCO—a implicit reference to this incident. It seems that alerting a repair station to a mislabeled oxygen canister is considered a firing offense at FAA these days.
While it takes a skilled and experienced inspector to find something as tiny as a single mislabeled canister in a five acre hangar, even I was able spot the day’s other major malfunction: TIMCO’s workers, while moving an Allegiant Air MD-80 from one hangar to another the day before, had lost control of the aircraft, which then rolled tail-first into the hangar wall. Pieces of MD-80 tail section littered the ground around the damaged aircraft, while the Arizona sun shone through a ten-foot gash in the hangar wall. “Basically, a lot of idiots had their hands in the cookie jar,” a TIMCO mechanic told us.
When we had finished our tour, Gonzales and I went to Michael Block’s office. The three-way conversation was casual and pleasant; Block was exceedingly friendly and helpful, and he was very much aware that I was a reporter. (In addition to Gonzales having introduced me as such, I was carrying a tape recorder and reporter’s notebook, and had given Block my business card, which reads “Frank Koughan, Journalist.”) When I asked Gonzales about some of the things we’d seen on the floor, he quickly responded—in Block’s presence—“As I mentioned, I’m not here as an inspector.” (Click here to listen.)
Later, I asked Block a technical question. While I was jotting down his answer in my notebook, Block interjected (as transcribed from my audiotape):
BLOCK: Don’t use my name in any of this, I’ll get shot! [Laughs]
KOUGHAN: [unintelligible] [General laughter]
GONZALES: You know what? It may be good for your [unintelligible] --
BLOCK: [Overtalk] fuck it! [Much laughter] I think there’s some kind of permission I’m supposed to have to actually talk with the press, but, uh, you’re here with a friend.
GONZALES: [Laughs]
KOUGHAN: Right, right, okay. Yes—I’m just here looking for information. I’m not here to get anyone fired.
GONZALES: [Overtalk] He’s not here to quote or publish your name.(Click here to listen.)
“I’m not here to get anyone fired,” I said, but this conversation helps explain why, 15 months later, Mike Gonzales stands to lose his job. Because when I later called TIMCO headquarters in North Carolina to get a statement about the AllegiantAir incident, the PR person was incredulous: “Excuse me, you were in the repair station?” I think it’s safe to assume that the first call this person made was to Michael Block. Block, having by his own admission invited a reporter into his repair station without getting proper clearances from his superiors—on a day his employees were picking up the pieces of an airplane they had crashed into a wall—was about to “get shot.” He insisted Gonzales and I had misled him, and has stuck to this story ever since.
Everybody knows the captain lied."
leonard Cohen
Why does this article not surprise me?