Airplane Industry Ethics

Paper Summary:

The paper reveals that many families of the victims of airplane crashes believe the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to be incapable of adequately monitoring the airline industries. The paper explains that these families charge that the NTSB is biased since it has too close a relationship with the airlines, which causes an inevitable conflict of interest. The paper points out the reliance on the airlines' integrity to hand over evidence from plane crashes and uses the crash of United Airlines Flight 585 in 1991 as a case in point. The paper discusses the need for a fair investigation and proposes using independent experts during crash investigations to achieve these unbiased findings.

From the Paper:

"A plane crash, "whether a large commercial airliner or a tiny home-built ultra light sets into motion a flurry of events" and always inevitably cumulates with a National Transportation Safety Board investigation (Hise 1991:1). "The men and women of the NTSB have a rare breed of government job," in that they are nonpartisan, non-official law enforcement authorities given the investigational power to find the cause, "often beginning with little more than a handful of crushed aluminum, of almost every aviation crash they investigate" and issue a report on airplane crashes (Hise 1999:1). These men and women are supposed to be noble fact-finders, neither interested in the airline industry's financial future, the bottom line of corporate America, or even the feelings of the families and the victims of the crash."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Alvarez, Michael. (6 Dec 1999). Crash course in ethics. Salon.com. Retrieved 1 Jul 2007at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/12/06/ntsb/index1.html
• Elias, Barbara (Ed). (11 Aug 2006). Government releases detailed information on 9/11crashes. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 196. Retrieved 1 Jul 2007 at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB196/index.htm.
• Hise, Phaedra. (1999). Grisly precision. Salon.com. Retrieved 1 Jul 2007 at http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/11/18/ntsb/index.html
• Investigations Involving Criminal Activity. (2007). NTSB Official Website. Retrieved 1Jul 2007 at http://www.ntsb.gov/Abt_NTSB/invest.htm#criminal
• NTSB resources overstretched and in urgent need of management reform claims study.(Dec 1999). Airline Industry News. Retrieved 1 Jul 2007 at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CWU/is_1999_Dec_13/ai_62834932

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