Airline Rule Threatens Pact With EU

The US House of Representatives passed a measure aimed at boosting air safety that threatens to disrupt cooperation with Europe.

The provision, passed as part of a bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration, requires for the first time that FAA experts inspect at least twice annually any overseas maintenance facility handling American airliners. Currently, the FAA relies heavily on inspections by its foreign counterparts.

The bill's sponsor, House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar, said he added the provision because US carriers are increasingly outsourcing maintenance work overseas. Inspections of these facilities would "ensure that foreign entities conducting repair work on US aircraft adhere to US safety standards and regulations," he recently told a gathering in Washington.

Opponents say the current system works fine, and the provision is an effort to protect US jobs. They say it will duplicate inspections.

Final passage of the FAA act could take months, as it must next go to the Senate, which could remove the inspection provision.

But the new provision has already prompted the European Union to freeze enactment of a safety accord signed last June with the US And EU officials say that if the US demands FAA inspection of European repair stations, they will respond by requiring European inspections of repair facilities in the US The overlapping inspections could cost millions of dollars for each side.

The new provision "goes against the spirit and the wording of the US-EU Aviation Safety Agreement," said Daniel Hoeltgen, spokesman for the European Aviation Safety Agency, or EASA, the EU's counterpart to the FAA. The accord would boost cooperation, in part by establishing a joint US-EU board to oversee maintenance and certification. EU officials say such mutual assistance can't work if the US is acting unilaterally.

An FAA spokeswoman declined to comment.

Air safety is a delicate topic now, as accidents in the US and Europe -- two of the world's safest aviation markets -- killed 220 people and destroyed seven airliners between August and February, significantly more than in recent years.

Backers of the provision say that maintenance outsourcing poses big safety risks. Robert Roach Jr., general vice president of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers, which represents US maintenance workers, recently told a congressional hearing that his members had repaired planes returning from overseas flights that had "departed with obvious mechanical problems."

Under current rules, the FAA works with foreign air-safety regulators to ensure their inspections of local repair shops are on par with what the FAA would do. FAA experts then use the foreign reviews -- plus FAA spot checks -- to certify repair stations for US airliners.

Some 700 facilities outside the US now maintain American planes, about 400 of them in Europe. In the US, more than 1,200 repair shops have certification by foreign aviation authorities on top of that from the FAA.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124291388570643335.html?mod=googlenews_wsj