We all have read repeatedly about lives lost due to refusing to follow Covid guidelines by reasonable scientists and doctors. This trend has continued into the Biden administration but started with the Former Guy. Republicans would love to blame the current administration for current deaths. Trump is also responsible, IMO, for lives lost due to locus of FAA oversight being moved thousands of miles away from Alaska aviation, and the resultant lack of oversight. This happened under the Trump administration. As Commander in Chief, why shouldn’t he be the one who takes final responsibility? We know that he would never do so voluntarily.
More experienced pilots who read the article cited below will undoubtedly have their jaw drop, especially since the FAA oversight of Alaskan Part 135 operators was so shoddy. Perhaps the budget wouldn’t allow for more inspectors. Why then were there budget constraints? IMO this is what can happen when government oversight is despised, demonstrating no respect for saving lives and doing an adequate job. How can any pilot who is a Trump supporter still be in Trump’s cult after seeing what happened with lives lost due to aviation accidents ?
www.aeropronews.com/…
“In September 2018, both Taquan’s DO and chief pilot were replaced. A month earlier a new POI, Todd Clamp, from Columbia, South Carolina, had been assigned to oversee Taquan Air. In his interview with investigators in October 2019, the Juneau FSDO office manager, Joseph Pocher, explained the office was responsible for about 160 certificates but had only two POIs despite approval for eight. This explained the need for assistance from outside the region. At the same time, FAA front line manager Richard Peabody described the shift of some responsibilities to South Carolina as “uncharted territory.” He said, “Right now what we’re doing is every Monday morning meeting that we have, we stress CMT [certificate management team] communication.” When asked who participated in those meetings, he replied “Everybody.” But investigators knew Clamp—based 2,800 miles away—did not. “Is that something he should be doing?” Peabody was asked. “Speculation,” he responded, “but yes.”
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A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was submitted to the FAA’s Alaska Region seeking correspondence between Taquan’s assigned POIs and the company to determine if particular concerns about oversight were passed from one inspector to the next.
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One week after the mid-air, Taquan crashed again, in Metlakatla. In that investigation, attention turned to the company’s risk-assessment procedures, first discussed after Jumbo Mountain. In his interview, the chief pilot acknowledged that Metlakatla could be “challenging” and did not know why a pilot who had completed training only nine days earlier was scheduled for the flight. Pressed on specific hazards, he stated, “It’s rising terrain, open water. There can be ocean swells in there…There can be different wind directions in there.” New hires, he explained, were assigned to “easy” flights, like tours. After about six weeks, they might incur lodge work before moving on to certain commuter flights. A flight follower had filled out the risk-assessment form for Flight 20 as part of regular dispatch procedures; she expressed no knowledge of the chief pilot’s inexperience concerns. The breakdown in operations management prompted the NTSB to list a contributing factor for the accident as “the company’s inadequate operational control of flight release procedures.” There are no interviews with the FAA on the docket for the Metlakatla accident.
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As to the FAA, in its response to a question regarding staffing and oversight of Alaskan Part 135 operators, the agency stated that it “has increased inspector staffing in all of the Alaska safety offices as we have elsewhere in the country. The number of operators per inspector is in line with agency standards.”