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Debra Katz is a whistleblower and civil rights attorney and a founding partner of Katz Banks Kumin LLP. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.
The United States has enjoyed years of extraordinarily safe air travel. While this is a remarkable feat, it shouldn’t take a viral video and loose bolts to invite tough questions for airplane manufacturers and the industry as a whole.
The recent news of a door plug on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blowing out after takeoff is alarming for all who fly. The resulting inspections of the Boeing 737 Max 9 fleet, which turned up loose bolts and similar issues in these planes, begs grave questions: How did this happen? Why didn’t we know about this? Why did it take a near disaster for these flaws to come to light?
This stunning problem also suggests that the safety we have enjoyed in commercial air travel has come in spite of decades of a Federal Aviation Administration that is, by its own admission, understaffed, underfunded and drained of expertise across the agency. In truth, it is clear now that we have not been very safe; instead, we have been very lucky. The only recent consequence of these problems domestically until now is a series of near misses on runways.
These safety and regulatory problems go far deeper than air traffic control; they have...
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