– 22454655

By DAVE MICHAELS / The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – A congressional committee is investigating regulators’ decision to grant immunity to Continental Airlines pilots for mistakes that led to an El Paso mechanic being sucked into a jet engine in 2006.

The mechanic inspecting the plane, Donald Gene Buchanan, 64, was killed. The Federal Aviation Administration’s team that granted amnesty to the pilots was composed of people with ties to Continental Airlines.

The FAA granted amnesty over the objections of a veteran safety inspector, Phil Thrash, who reported his concerns to the FAA’s administrator and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s inspector general.

The complaint has become part of a wider investigation, led by Rep. Jim Oberstar, of the FAA’s supervision of commercial airline safety. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has asked Mr. Thrash to testify at an April 3 hearing.

Mr. Thrash’s testimony signals the House committee’s investigation extends beyond recent problems with Southwest Airlines into other allegations of lapsed oversight in the Southwestern region, which includes Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Mr. Oberstar, D-Minn., has criticized the FAA’s regulatory approach, which stresses partnership and information-sharing with airlines instead of investigations that lead to fines and other sanctions.

The FAA said it dealt with the Continental crew’s mistakes with retraining and a written warning because its actions weren’t intentional and crew members lacked written guidance about how to deal with the maintenance problem. Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman, said the agency didn’t support the investigation that Mr. Thrash wanted to start.

Officials with Continental Airlines declined to comment.

The Continental crew escaped punishment by having its case accepted into the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), through which pilots can avoid sanctions if they voluntarily report mistakes.

Mr. Thrash, an Air Force veteran who retired after 20 years from an FAA office in Houston in December, spoke this week to a reporter who independently learned about the accident and contacted him. Mr. Thrash stressed that his complaint was with the FAA’s handling of the case, not with Continental Airlines or its flight crew.

“They washed their hands of the whole matter,” Mr. Thrash said of FAA managers. “It was a cover-up.”

The accident occurred on Jan. 16, 2006, as a team of maintenance contractors inspected a Boeing 737 for an oil leak. After finding a small leak, one mechanic requested the captain increase the engine thrust to 70 percent to conduct more checks, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s accident investigation.

The pilot couldn’t see the mechanic, but he was told that the area around the plane was clear. At the time, a forward door was open and a woman in a wheelchair was about to board via a lift truck.

The crew didn’t have FAA-approved training to perform a high-power engine run near the terminal.

Mr. Thrash said the pilots also failed to consult an operations manual, which they had in the plane. The manual spelled out procedures for dealing with maintenance problems at an airport with no Continental maintenance base, Mr. Thrash said.

The airline’s separate maintenance manual prohibited engine runs above idle unless authorized by an airport; the El Paso airport had restricted engine power to idle at the terminal ramp since 1996.

Based on those apparent safety violations, Mr. Thrash began drawing up a list of questions for the crew, he said. A supervisor then told him to provide the questions to FAA inspectors who were on an “event review committee,” which included two representatives from Continental.

A week later, the committee agreed that the case would be dealt with through ASAP, meaning Mr. Thrash had no further opportunity to investigate.

“I could not accomplish my job, which was to look at the actions of the crew,” Mr. Thrash said. “It’s beyond the pale of common sense to run an engine up to 70 percent of rated thrust with passengers on board and an unknown engine condition.”

Ms. Brown said the crew relied on verbal instructions from the mechanics, who didn’t have copies of the airline’s maintenance manual and didn’t call the airline to get advice about dealing with the leak. The NTSB primarily blamed the mechanics.

The FAA also issued a written warning to Continental’s maintenance controller, Ms. Brown said. The airline paid a $45,000 fine. The contract maintenance provider paid a $1,100 fine, she said.

The event committee included a Continental Airlines official and a representative from its pilots union. The third member was Paul LeBlanc, an FAA inspector in Houston who previously flew for Texas International Airlines, which merged with Continental in 1982.

Mr. LeBlanc said in an interview that he flew his last flight for the company in October 1983 but didn’t consider himself a Continental pilot. He said he fully interviewed the crew and decided against legal sanctions because the crew’s mistakes weren’t intentional and they offered valuable insight.

“Now there are elaborate, written procedures that have to be followed by maintenance and by the flight crews before they do anything like that, whereas that was not in place before,” Mr. LeBlanc said.

Mr. Thrash’s former supervisor, John T. Merrifield, said in an interview that he generally disagreed with the practice of dealing with accidents through ASAP before investigating them.

However, he didn’t demur when his own bosses overruled Mr. Thrash’s complaint, Mr. Merrifield said.

“I just think that once an accident occurs, the accident investigation should take priority over ASAP,” said Mr. Merrifield, who also retired last year.

The FAA found that Continental’s pilots shouldn’t have relied on the mechanic’s instructions, according to federal records. The airline instituted new policies requiring pilots to better coordinate engine runs with their operations control center.

In February 2006, Mr. Thrash sent an e-mail to Marion Blakey, then the FAA’s administrator, to complain about the FAA’s handling of the incident and to urge a re-examination of the crew. The FAA looked into his complaint, but John M. Allen, the deputy director of flight standards service in Washington, upheld the event committee’s decision.

Investigators from the inspector general’s office interviewed Mr. Thrash and other FAA inspectors in Houston in October 2006, according to Mr. Thrash and Mr. LeBlanc. Mr. Thrash said he didn’t hear from the inspector general’s staff again until after he talked to a congressional investigator in February.

Mr. Oberstar’s hearing will include at least 19 witnesses, according to the FAA. Two Irving-based inspectors who have been granted whistle-blower protection after pushing an investigation of Southwest Airlines’ safety lapses are expected to testify.

An official close to the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous because he didn’t have clearance to disclose names of witness, said Mr. Thrash is scheduled to testify as well.

Mr. LeBlanc said Mr. Oberstar’s assault on the partnership programs is wrong-headed. The FAA that once stressed enforcement knew only about “5 to 7 percent of what was really going on out there,” he said.

Now that carriers feel comfortable with sharing their errors, the skies are safer because “we have knowledge of about 90 or more percent of what’s going on,” he said.

But Mr. Thrash said the public would “be aghast” if it knew the type of errors accepted into ASAP, where they become confidential.