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American Airlines is "limping back to normal after a four-day travel nightmare," NBC's Tom Costello stated, as fewer than 600 flights were canceled Friday in order to fix the wiring on its MD-80 jetliners. As he did Thursday, ABC anchor Charles Gibson (no link) continued to blame the disruption on pedantic bureaucrats at the Federal Aviation Administration--"safety regulation run amok"--rather than on sloppy maintenance at American Airlines. He called on John Nance, his network's aviation consultant to back him up. Nance called the FAA's rigidity "a gross overreaction" finding no evidence that the defective wiring bundles were "safety critical."
At CBS, Nancy Cordes suggested that the disruptions had "more to do with politics than safety" after "Congress pushed the FAA to get tougher" following its expose of excessive leniency for Southwest Airlines. "That get-tough approach cost American Airlines an estimated $40m to $50m." NBC's Costello was not convinced that the airline was being treated unfairly, calling the canceled flights "the result of American's failure to properly comply with an FAA airworthiness directive that expired in early March." The directives are nothing unusual, Costello explained: 88 are on file for MD-80s, 275 for A-320s, 518 for 737s.
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