Fear of Flying

This article here from News8 oughta scare you right out of the skies.

Now there is evidence of repair facilities hiring low-wage mechanics who can't read English.

Twenty-one people were killed when U.S. Airways Express Flight 5481 crashed in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2003. The plane went wildly out of control on takeoff.

One reason for the crash, investigators found, was that mechanics incorrectly connected the cables to some of the plane's control surfaces in the repair shop. The FAA was cited for improper oversight of the repair process.

Repairing airplanes is a complicated business. Airplanes have many manuals. Typically, when mechanics repair a part, they open the manual, consult the book, and make the repair step-by-step, as if it were a recipe book.

They make a list of every action they take, so the next person to fix the plane (as well as the people who fly it) will know exactly what has been done.

If mechanics don't speak English, the international language of aviation, they can't read the manual and they can't record their activities.

There are more than 236 FAA-certified aircraft repair stations in Texas, according to the FAA's Web site. News 8 has learned that hundreds of the mechanics working in those shops do not speak English and are unable to read repair manuals for today's sophisticated aircraft.

Former FAA inspector Bill McNease told News 8 he regularly encountered applicants for pilots’ licenses who tried to pretend they could speak English — but could not.

"When I was based in Dallas, I had that happen every week," McNease said. "It was not uncommon at all to have foreign flight students. We had mechanics, but I handled the pilot end of it.... and I turned down people every week because they couldn't speak English."

"There are people [where I work] who do not know how to read a maintenance manual as they are spelled out, because they don't have a clue," said one certified aircraft mechanic who works at a Texas aircraft repair station. He wished to remain anonymous to protect his employment.

Read the rest and support immigration controls. It's your life.