Safety Outsourced is Safety Eliminated

Harold Meyerson in the WaPo:

Outsourcing Our Safety

Amid the horrific images that flashed across our TV screens during the past month, there was one last week that stood out because it was so unexpectedly reassuring: that of a supremely competent pilot steering a JetBlue airliner with jammed front wheels to a safe landing at Los Angeles International Airport.

Since last week's landing, though, we've learned a couple of other things that aren't quite so comforting -- for instance, that this was at least the seventh time that the front wheels on an Airbus A-320 have gotten locked in the wrong position.

More surprising still was the news about JetBlue's long-term maintenance of its aircraft. When the planes are inspected for damage and then reassembled, the work takes place either in Canada or El Salvador....

[L]icensed, in-house mechanics are increasingly the exception at U.S. airlines. About half of the long-term maintenance on the planes of U.S. carriers is outsourced, and much of that work takes place overseas, where FAA inspections are a sometime thing. Indeed, the point of this story isn't that JetBlue's decisions are in any way exceptional. To the contrary, by going abroad for work that would previously have been performed at home (and except for maintenance, JetBlue doesn't fly outside the United States), and by prioritizing costs over more closely inspected maintenance, the airline is an exemplar of 21st-century capitalism.

God forgive me, I find myself hoping to see Tom Friedman and his flat world economy theory (I prefer to call it the "global pancake") sitting on a JetBlue plane making a locked-wheel landing on national TV and on the seatback TV in front of him. Then let him tell me how great the outsourcing of American jobs is.