FAA officials still fly through revolving door
Many travel back and forth from jobs as regulators to airline positions
WASHINGTON — Two weeks after a federal safety official said at a public hearing that "a recipe for an accident" led to the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 and the loss of 50 lives, the parent of the regional airline that operated that doomed flight did something it had never done before.
It hired a lobbyist — and not just any lobbyist.
Pinnacle Airlines hired a former assistant administrator at the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with regulating airline safety.
Since May, Megan Rae Rosia, who returned to lobbying late last year after leaving her post as the FAA's assistant administrator for government and industry affairs, has received $40,000 to lobby Congress on behalf of Pinnacle, federal records show.
And Rosia, an aviation attorney with Crowell & Moring, is by no means the only Washington insider to job-hop between the airline industry and the government agency that regulates it.
An online database, maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington watchdog group, lists 38 current or former high-level FAA officials who have flitted between government and industry.
And a review by The Buffalo News of airline lobbying records unearthed several others, including Rosia.
The FAA's chief operating officer, for example, is a former United Airlines vice president.
Among its lobbyists, American Airlines counts Linda Daschle — a former acting administrator of the FAA and the wife of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.
Good-government types describe this coziness between the government and the airlines it regulates as "a revolving door" and say it deserves scrutiny, particularly as the families of those on Continental Flight 3407 battle the airline industry over a congressional proposal to boost pilot training.
"It is a very troubling phenomenon, and it appears to be particularly pernicious in regard to the FAA," said Craig Holman of Public Citizen, who worked with a coalition of good-government groups to produce "A Matter of Trust," a 2005 report on the revolving-door issue throughout the federal government.
"At the FAA, we just ran into story after story of the revolving door going in both directions," Holman said.
Pinnacle decided to hire someone through that revolving door at a critical time for the company.
The National Transportation Safety Board held three days of hearings in mid-May on the February crash of Flight 3407 in Clarence. Testimony at those hearings questioned the level of stall-recovery training that Colgan Air, the Pinnacle subsidiary that operated that flight, had provided the crew.
In addition, testimony showed that Rebecca L. Shaw, the co-pilot, earned only about $16,000 a year and commuted from Seattle to Newark, N.J., on connecting red-eye flights.
"I think it's a recipe for an accident," Kathryn O'Leary Higgins, a safety board member, said at the hearing.
Two weeks after Higgins said that, Rosia signed up as Pinnacle's lobbyist.
Rosia's office referred questions about her work to Joe F. Williams, Pinnacle's spokesman. Williams declined to comment on whether Rosia's hiring might raise any ethical questions, but he explained that Pinnacle hired her largely to set up meetings on Capitol Hill for Philip H. Trenary, the company's chief executive officer.
"She's really not doing any active lobbying," Williams said. "Her role with us is that we asked her to help us with the logistics of some of the informational meetings Phil did on the Hill."
The topics covered at those meetings included Flight 3407, general aviation safety issues and other industry matters, Williams said.
"We didn't really ask anyone to do anything for us; they were informational only," Williams said. Rosia "went ahead and registered as a lobbyist just to make sure she had all the bases covered."
Pinnacle executives decided to hire Rosia because they knew her from her days at Northwest Airlines, where she had worked before joining the FAA, Williams said — adding that her role at the FAA was not a consideration in her hiring.
Still, others with expertise in the aviation field said Rosia's hiring was part of a much larger picture — one that finds the FAA and onetime industry employees all too intertwined.
"They're the go-along, get-along people," said Gail A. Dunham, executive director of the National Air Disaster Alliance, which fights to raise air safety standards.
Revolving-door figures are well-connected enough to help the industry get its way, Dunham said.
She cited the example of Linda Daschle. As an FAA executive, Daschle resisted calls for child safety seats on airplanes. Later, Daschle returned to her earlier role as a prominent airline industry lobbyist.
Other former FAA officials have gone to work not for the airlines, but for aircraft manufacturers or the groups that represent them. Former FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, for instance, now heads the Aerospace Industries Association.
That sort of back-and-forth movement isn't limited to the Washington lobbying community, said Barrett Byrnes, a retired FAA air traffic controller and government air safety investigator.
He said he knew of an FAA supervisor who retired and joined Delta Air Lines — where he started pressuring air traffic controllers to get Delta's way.
"I always thought this was one of the biggest conflicts of interest that could possibly happen," Byrnes said of employees jumping between the FAA and the industry.
Rules govern such moves, and more are being developed at the FAA, said Laura J. Brown, an agency spokeswoman. Already, FAA inspectors hired away from an airline can't oversee the company they just left.
Federal law also prohibits former high-level appointees like Rosia from lobbying their former agency for a year — although they are free to lobby Congress.
Government watchdogs have been pushing for further restrictions for years, and they won a partial victory when President Obama issued an executive order on his first day of office setting some new limits on the revolving door. Executive-branch appointees now are barred from leaving and then lobbying any senior executive branch official for the rest of the Obama administration. Newly hired federal officials also are not allowed to make policy involving their former employer for two years.
But those new rules don't apply to well-connected bureaucrats-turned-lobbyists who might want to pressure Congress. Those are the kind of officials who "might get an inside track denied to all others," said Holman, of Public Citizen.
Members of Families of Continental Flight 3407 have that fear now that an association representing the major airlines has voiced its opposition to a congressional proposal to boost the number of flight hours required for new pilots to 1,500 from 250, an idea the families strongly favor.
"It's the little people versus a big industry," said Kevin Kuwik, one of the key members of the families group.
The airline industry has money as well as connections. The Air Transport Association, the group representing the airlines, has spent $3.49 million on lobbying so far this year, part of $13 million in total in airline industry lobbying expenditures, federal records show.
The transport association lobbied to educate lawmakers on a broad range of issues and not just air safety, said David A. Castelveter, vice president for communications at the group.
Asked why the transport association hired people with backgrounds in government, Castelveter said, "We're trying to find the best and the brightest, the ones that are the most expert at what they do on the issues that we face."
Others said the relationship between the aviation agency and industry is not that simple.
In some cases, the best, most experienced people the FAA can hire come from the airlines, said George Donohue, director of the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research at George Mason University.
Yet Donohue, a former associate administrator at the FAA, said he also knew people during his time at the agency who let their interest in landing a high-paying lobbying job influence the policy decisions they made.
"It comes down to the individual ethics of the person," he said.
And that's just what worries some of those who lost loved ones on Flight 3407.
"It's an incestuous industry," said Scott Maurer, who lost his daughter, Lorin, in the crash. "They just go back and forth and back and forth and pat each other on the back."
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