Panel Discussion with Modal Officials

MR. PHILLIPS: Thank you. I wish I was paid at the level of a guru, but. We have a lot of territory to cover today and very little time to do it, only one hour. So, we're going to handle this panel a little bit differently than other panels.

We are going to dispense with any opening statements. I will give a very brief introduction, one at a time, of these folks, and ask sort of an opening question, which they can then answer, and if they have something they really need to say that was in their opening statement, then it will be just fine. That's the time to bring it up.

But we need to be as efficient as possible with our time because there are a lot of people and a lot of territory to cover.

So, I'm going to go right straight into it with somebody who you do all know, and in fact if you don't know any of these folks up here or many of them certainly in your particular mode, then you're in the wrong room, and the National Blood Policy Forum is down the hall. So, if you made that very logical mistake, you can leave now.

First is Jane Garvey, Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, who thought that she was having fun at Federal Highways until she got this job. So, Jane, I guess the question for you is the question that's on the minds of everyone, and I'm even led to believe there may be an answer.

Why has it taken the FAA this long to make some sort of preliminary rule on 737 data recorders, and what, if anything, do you plan to do about it?

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: I was so hoping the question was going to be what's a nice girl like you doing in a business like this.

MR. PHILLIPS: I've asked that several times and never got an answer.

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: Well, let me start by, if I could, putting it in a little bit of historic context, at least from the perspective of aviation.

Flight data first appeared on the commercial aircraft really in the early '40s. So, they have been around for awhile, while what has been more sophisticated or what passed as more sophisticated equipment came on to the scene in 1958. So, it's been here for awhile.

The device, as everyone in this room knows, is really to tell the accident investigator what happened, to provide, if you will, a blueprint on what deficiencies need to be fixed, and that's really what we focused on.

They have been critical for us, and the kind of information we've gotten on flight data has been absolutely critical in determining both the reliability and the credibility for us, and it's become really the foundation to push through new regulations and secure that the industry costs that come with the corrective action, and I want to stress that because from our perspective, that credibility has really been critical to us.

We have learned a tremendous amount over the last 50 years from flight recorders. It's elevated accident investigation to really a fine science and resulted in wholesale operational system and procedural changes in the aviation industry.

Eastern 66, which I know Don is familiar with and many in this room are familiar with, is an accident which occurred in 1975. It gave us, I think, a much greater understanding of the effects of wind shear, and because of the information that we were able to glean, we put in place new ground-based detection systems, improved weather forecasting, training procedures, and the result is very straightforward, and that is a major reduction in wind shear accidents.

I think Chairman Hall this morning spoke about a number of other changes that we've been able to make which really, I think, underscores beyond any doubt the safety value of the sophisticated flight recorders.

We have really been, I think, at a critical point in the last five years, and there are really two key elements which underscores, I think, for us our experience of the last five years.

First of all, the accidents themselves. The accidents themselves have become much more complex. No easy answers, no obvious causal answers, if you will.

The second is that the public expectation around aviation has become even higher. We have an extraordinary record in safety in aviation, but the public expectation of what they expect from us, I think, has become even greater.

So, the Board and the public have really been asking us is there more than we can do to gather information? If knowledge is power, then certainly more accurate knowledge, more detailed knowledge is even more powerful when it comes to accident investigation, not just as an after-the-fact but also as a way to detect trends and to detect early warning signals, if you will.

That really brings us to the 427 Board meeting with the recommended additional parameters for the 737 aircraft. I want to talk about that a little bit.

As a result of the Board meeting in March, and then their subsequent report to us in April, they recommended then additional parameters for the 737 aircraft. These parameters deal with the operation, primarily deal with the operation of the rudder system.

There were two deadlines that they put in place for us. One was July 2000 for the newer aircraft, and August 2001 for the older aircraft. Today, we are announcing that we will put forward a proposal consistent with the Board recommendations. So, we are staying with the Board recommendation, and that means that for the older 737s, a final compliance date for the upgraded parameters of all of the recommendations that we've seen is August 2001.

For the newer aircraft, it's our intention that the additional parameters which focused on the rudder system would be installed by August 4th, 2000. We know this is a very ambitious undertaking. We want to work very closely with the airlines to take maximum advantage of the heavy maintenance operations and opportunities, and to be sure that the steps we are taking are thoughtful and deliberative.

But our point remains the same, and our point is fundamentally this: that we agree with the intention of the Board, and we intend to carry that out.

Those are the recommendations that came out of the 427 investigation. There are also recommendations on recorders that came out of the SwissAir investigation as well. In March, seven months after the September 1998 SwissAir accident, the NTSB asked for existing aircraft to increase the 30-minute recordings now required on cockpit voice recorders to two hours, moving from 30 minutes to two hours.

The Board also asked for a 10-minute back-up power supply. They've requested that this be done by January 1st, 2005. In addition, the Board asked that new aircraft produced after January 1st, 2003, have the following: new technology recorders, and that they have combinations, voice and data recording systems. One should be in the front of the aircraft, and the other in the rear of the aircraft.

I can say today that our intent is to propose a rule with the same requirements, and very much again in keeping with the Board recommendation.

From our perspective, our united purpose must be to prevent future accidents, and certainly within the aviation industry, the uses of flight and the use of flight data information, flight data technology, provide really a critical took not only to prevent accidents but to continue to maintain and to make even better the extraordinary safety record that we have in aviation.

So, I think from our perspective, and from the Board's perspective, that is good news, and we're prepared to carry out the recommendations.

MR. PHILLIPS: Now, that was about as efficient a brief answer as I believe I've ever heard.

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: And I never answered your question, did I? Part of my plan, Don.

MR. PHILLIPS: Thank you. I should at this point mention that assuming we have time, there will be questions from the floor, and I believe I have a few here already written out, written questions. I think there will be people around who will be able to take and bring them up here, Mr. Cash or others, and that last presentation may well present a few questions, and especially if everyone is as efficient as Ms. Garvey, we'll have plenty of time for questions.

Logically, I should go on at this point to ICAO, an aviation organization, but I think I'm going to switch the order just a little bit and go to the Federal Highways because there are some issues that have come up here quite vociferously this morning, and there have been a lot of questions asked, and now that we have some news from Federal Aviation, perhaps we could get some news or hints from Federal Highways.

We have with us Kenneth Wykle, the Administrator, who has had this job since November 10th, 1997. He comes out of a military background. He's a West Virginian, born in Ronksburg. Now, am I pronouncing that properly?

ADMINISTRATOR WYKLE: That's good enough.

MR. PHILLIPS: I may be one of the few people here who's been there several times.

So, I guess the question for you, Mr. Wykle, you may have heard Gerhard Lehmann talking this morning about the extensive use of recorders in Europe on trucks and even automobiles and their effect on highway safety.

The NTSB made its first recommendation to Federal Highways a decade ago, and I guess the question is, when can we expect regulatory action from Federal Highways?

ADMINISTRATOR WYKLE: They worked at it for four years. So, I guess I have another year or two to go, but, first of all, I'd like to say that the Federal Highway Administration published a strategic plan about a year ago, and in there, we laid out five guiding principles, and one of those was to leverage technology and innovation.

So, we are strong supporters of applying technology to improve all of our transportation systems, and we certainly join with the NTSB and the other modes to encourage the expanded use of recorders on all of the transportation modes.

To kind of demonstrate our commitment to that, we're currently involved with a pilot program with Warner Enterprises. You may have seen their large trucks operating on the highways. They're based in Omaha, Nebraska, have 6 or 7,000 power units and operate all over the United States, but using global positioning system technology to better manage the hours of service and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their particular company, and the emerging results of that are really, really positive.

I mean their hours-of-service violations are running about 2.5 percent. The next closest one to them from an industry standpoint is seven percent in terms of hours-of-service violations. So, this shows you the capabilities of this technology and how it has the potential to reduce violations of hours-of-service, and that's a critical issue for us.

We have another 10 to 12 companies that have seen the success of this work, and, so, they are applying and wanting to use this same type of technology and get the waiver, if you will, from the manual log book to be able to keep the automated log book.

So, we fully support and champion the use of the on-board recorders within the commercial motor vehicles.

MR. PHILLIPS: If I might follow up on that just briefly, is this a subject that should be dealt with by regulation at some point in the process, and I guess as corollary to that is, will the American driver, truck drivers and/or automobile drivers, ever accept it?

ADMINISTRATOR WYKLE: Sure. Well, up to this point in time, the Federal Highway Administration has tried to encourage voluntary use of this technology and championed the benefits of it and point out the improvements that the companies stand to gain from this.

We're certainly looking at the results of this pilot test and debating whether or not if it does not gain wide acceptance, whether or not it would be appropriate to issue a rule or have some type of a regulatory requirement there.

So, we are, based upon the results of this, exploring the possibilities as to whether at some later date, regulatory requirement might be necessary.

In terms of driver acceptance, I guess the jury is kind of still out on that because some look at it as "Big Brother watching". We certainly don't look at it from that aspect. Again, from Warner Enterprises' experience, it appears that they're having a significant reduction in crashes, certainly more efficient and effective operations.

If it can be shown that there's an economic benefit to using this technology, then we think it will be more widely accepted. So, our approach needs to be to point out the positive aspects of using the technology in terms of reducing crashes, saving money from an insurance standpoint, less cost in terms of repairing damaged vehicles, improved efficiency, adding to the bottom line, and then we feel it would be more readily accepted.

MR. PHILLIPS: All right. Thank you. I'd like to go next to Mr. Don Bischoff, whose biography says he dedicated his entire 35-year professional career to highway safety. That's really been an uphill battle, I know, from the statistics.

But he's been at NHTSA since 1970 and moved up to his current position, and I guess the question I'd like to ask, since you don't have direct jurisdiction over recorders in trucks and automobiles, but are you persuaded that the European experience, which was talked about this morning, is correct, that it would save many thousands of lives, and do you think that the Government should be moving faster?

MR. BISCHOFF: Let me just say, first of all, that NHTSA's very enthusiastic about the contribution that event data recorders can make to understanding the circumstances that surround highway crashes. We think there's a multitude of uses for the data.

We believe for ourselves, we can write more meaningful crashworthiness/crash avoidance regulations. We think that roadway design can be improved by under-standing the crash dynamics better. We can have improved air bag sensing systems on vehicles. We can facilitate automatic collision notification systems and get emergency medical help to people faster.

We can have more objective data for investigating defects. These are just to name a few of the things that we can do. So, what we've been doing in NHTSA to facilitate that is we've formed a working group under our Motor Vehicle Safety and Research Advisory Council, where we've brought together the motor vehicle manufacturers, the truck manufacturers, people from state government, the Administrator of Transport in Canada, academia and elsewhere, and we're trying to define what the functional requirements for EDRs ought to be, understand what the current technology is capable of doing, trying to define a common set of data, prioritize what that data should be, and resolve issues surrounding legal and privacy issues, and we think we're well along with that.

We're using event data recorder data that's available on -- there's 30 million GM vehicles out there right now that have EDRs on them. We're using that in our own special crash investigations. So, most of the light-duty vehicles in the fleet right now require some sort of crash severity-sensing system. They're on the vehicles to deploy the air bags. We can take advantage of that, and, so, our posture right now is that we don't really see the need for regulation.

We believe that the industry, certainly the light-duty vehicle industry, is moving towards incorporating EDRs on their vehicle, and many of the issues that need to be addressed, the legal and privacy concerns, what the technology is capable of can probably better be addressed outside the regulatory environment, but, we're, you know, standing by and facilitating discussion, and I think the industry's moving in that direction. So, we don't foresee a need for regulation at the moment.

MR. PHILLIPS: All right. I might have moved so rapidly through that introduction, that I forgot to give the name of his agency. Just in case, it's the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Next, I'd like to return to aviation with someone who has already addressed the group this morning, Caj Frostell. I hope I got the last name correct. I did check on the first.

But he's been in this business for quite some time. This is one of the briefest biographies I've seen in a long time to be so packed with interesting things, starting way back with Korean 007 when he was ICAO leader of the ICAO team. I won't go through all of these accidents. Many of you probably were there.

I guess the question, Mr. Frostell, was something that you brought up this morning but didn't pursue, and that's the question of video recording.

Do you think the world's pilots will ever accept that, and do you think that we will see the day before too long when the cockpit will be video recorded on every flight?

MR. FROSTELL: Well, thank you. Yes, I was privileged to address the meeting already this morning. So, I will not have a general statement. I will address your question with a feedback to my presentation where I said that ICAO sets the international standards, international requirements.

Now, there are a few fields where ICAO needs to be in the forefront in order to achieve the necessary standardization. For example, the global navigation systems where the standardization needs to be there from the beginning.

In flight recorders, there's been a few occasions where we have been led by the world experts to introduce either standards and recommended practices that have not been fully implemented by the contracting states, and I'm here really referring to such standards and recommended practices that has not been implemented by a single state fully, and I believe that's an undesirable direction where to go.

So, ICAO needs to be a bit more cautious in the flight recorder field. If things are basically okay, we should not necessarily be on the forefront. We should be in the middle in a way that those developed states develop the national regulations preferably in the harmonious way with each other, and then the time will come for ICAO to pick up and pick up the over hundred other states to the same level.

Now, the video recording is certainly in the same field here. We need to see national legislation requirements in a number of more developed states before ICAO action is prudent.

We are keeping abreast of the technology through our flight recorder panel, which the members of which represents the leading experts in the world. Personally, yes, I believe we will come there, and the issue of privacy is linked to the other privacy issues, the use of the CVR. It's the use of safety-related information or data analysis programs.

I believe we have to find a satisfactory solution in all these fields. So, yes, I believe in perhaps 10 years, we will see video recording in the cockpits.

Thank you.

MR. PHILLIPS: Thank you. Next, we have Jolene Molitoris, Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration. She's been in that position since 1993, a long time.

Railroading, as you might know, wrestles with maritime for being a man's world, and, so, she's a woman in a man's world, but as a number of railroad officials have told me, you mess with Jolene at your peril. So, anyway, let me ask a question having to do with the current process for deciding when to put out a new set of rules on recorders for locomotives, etc.

The Railroad Safety Advisory Council, commonly known as RSAC, has been working on these for some time, and I believe Mr. English said that you were working toward a notice of proposed rulemaking for December.

However, it's my understanding that RSAC has been rather inactive on this for some time, that there haven't been meetings for awhile, and I guess the question is, have you gone past the process at which you need their advice, but, more importantly, are you dedicated to a December NPRM on this? That's notice of proposed rulemaking for those of you who may not know.

ADMINISTRATOR MOLITORIS: Thanks, Don. We are dedicated to getting it out as soon as we possibly can. Let's just put in context the whole issue of RSAC.

RSAC is an opportunity for FRA, labor-management, manufacturers, to get together. There's a 48-member voting board, and it's just had its third anniversary, and the result of that -- and I saw somebody shaking their head when I say a 48-member board. It's actually working extremely well, even though the voices of doom were rampant in the beginning.

As a matter of fact, -- and I give credit not only to the professionals at FRA but to RSAC members and their working groups for FRA having the most productive rulemaking year last year, 1998, the most significant rules ever put out in a year by FRA.

It's also important to note that in the three years of this organization's life, there have been more than 800 individuals involved on working groups on a broad variety of subjects, and I think it's important to mention that number because it's fairly awesome to me when I think about it even now, and it's a real indicator of commitment, Don, commitment of time, of resources, of energy, by all the parties, but in particularly, rail labor and rail management.

We believe that the RSAC Working Group on Event Recorders has really done an excellent job of providing a strong data foundation for the rule. What some people don't realize is they don't like the rule in RSAC, and I know we have safety people here. I don't know if we have any of our counsel office people here, but as you will note next week, when the passenger equipment rule comes out, and it will set a record by FRA standards of being over 600 pages. That gives you some clue on what it takes to get these things done.

The work that's going on is within the team at FRA now, taking the database foundation and the results of the strong discussions and putting it into a format which will become that notice of proposed rulemaking by the end of the year.

Obviously we'd like to break a last year's record this year, and even produce more rules than we did last year. So, we're very motivated to do it as fast as we can. It's got to consider a lot of things, as you know. It's got to consider economic benefits, all the kinds of information that we got from the working group.

Considering that our last rule just became fully effective in 1995, I think we're on a good track to get this in that form and final in the year 2000, and I should say that the NTSB has been one of our partners on this.

NTSB has been active in the rulemaking area. Is Ed here? There you are. Hi, Ed. He's been involved in the working group. He's been a big help. I think that the result is going to show direct response to the recommendations of NTSB, and I think that we're very fortunate considering the issue of event recorders.

MR. PHILLIPS: Okay. So, if not December, early in 2000?

ADMINISTRATOR MOLITORIS: No, no, no. When I said 2000, I'm talking about when it's final.

MR. PHILLIPS: Oh, final.

ADMINISTRATOR MOLITORIS: I'm talking about notice of proposed rulemaking this year.

MR. PHILLIPS: This year? Okay.

ADMINISTRATOR MOLITORIS: Yes.

MR. PHILLIPS: All right. Fine. Sorry, I misunderstood.

Kelley Coyner is Administrator of perhaps one of the least known, but one of the more important of the modal administrations, the Research and Special Programs Administration.

She has been there since August 6th, 1998. She is a lawyer by background, but you don't have to be upset because I can't see from her biography here that she's ever sued anybody in this room, and in fact, back when I was on the Hill, we used to call the sort of law that she appears to have practiced do-gooder law. So, relax.

The question for her is I know that before I came in this morning, I had no idea how sophisticated recording systems were for pipelines or at least potentially. I still don't know to this moment how many of those systems there are out there, but are you persuaded of the usefulness of capturing pipeline operations data for safety purposes, and is this something that you are looking into or will?

ADMINISTRATOR COYNER: I would say the vast majority of pipeline systems now use what we call supervisory control and data acquisition systems, also known as SCADA systems, and they're used primarily for operational purposes, not really day-to-day, but minute-to-minute operational issues to monitor flow rates and temperature changes.

They also give us, as pipeline companies put more leak detection equipment in place, ability to detect abrupt changes in pressure that might show a rupture.

That in and of itself is a key safety feature because it allows for very quick changes in the operational system, as you look at the real-time data. Where we see advances is in the ability to look at the information that we have after an incident.

The current systems or the ones we've had in place for awhile really provide you a linear read-out of what the information is. You can see, you know, which pump came on or off, which valve opened or shut, what the pressure levels were, but that doesn't necessarily tell you what happened, and as the computers have gotten more sophisticated, and the software has gotten better, we are looking at improvements in the ability to do play-back scenarios, ones that really reconstruct what happened when we had a particular incident.

We're also learning more about how the operator controllers use the inputs as they come in, what the human factors are in using that, and we are beginning to look at ways that we've corrected that on particular systems, but also advisories on how others might use that.

We are very much persuaded that this is a valuable tool, but we think it's important to remember for the pipeline systems, that it's an interactive issue with the human operator, and it's not just something that is a recorder to look at the incident after it's happened.

MR. PHILLIPS: All right. Thank you. Admiral James C. Card is the Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard. He has held that job since July 24th, 1998, and I will not read his entire biography, but believe me, it would be a tour of the world.

This included, we've discovered in another meeting that I had written about a bridge that was once under his jurisdiction, which I called the "most battered bridge in America". It was hit so many times by barges, that they actually set up a video recorder that some suspected that in addition to safety purposes was for the amusement of the folks in the Coast Guard office who said here comes another one, and I hear they got pretty good actually at determining miles away. Oops, that one's going to hit, turn on the recorder.

So, in any case, I guess the question for Admiral Card is, where do recorders sit in your list of priorities? There are a lot of other things out there, as has been pointed out today, that may have a more direct and immediate safety effect, and there's going to be a lot of problems in persuading this very world of big shipping to adopt these things.

So, if you could just give us a description of your priorities on this, we'd appreciate it.

ADMIRAL CARD: This has been an issue for marine shipping for awhile, and because most of the ships that come and go from our country are not U.S. flag ships, they're foreign flag ships, the way to adjudicate this issue is through the International Maritime Organization. So, this is one of the important priorities that the Coast Guard, is to convince the world's shippers, if you will, and shipping countries that we should have voyage data recorders really for two purposes.

One is, as many of us said in the prevention side, to look at what might have happened, and people can learn from those, companies can learn from those, as well as to do the post-game analysis on the accidents.

First of all, some of the other modes travel a little faster. The ship's been around for a long time, and even today, you don't get any that go over a hundred knots, and, so, sometimes the international movement of regulation is a little slower as well.

But the good news is that there are performance standards which have been developed at the International Maritime Organization. We've been a big part in making that happen, and now they're working to what we call the carriage requirements, and that process is also moving on.

So, as I say, it's important. It's important in understanding the human factors that are involved, and many of us will recognize that a lot of the accidents which happen involve the people and not necessarily a breakdown of the equipment, although that sometimes happens as well.

So, it has the priority, and it's moving forward, and in a positive slope.

MR. PHILLIPS: All right. And next we have -- and please forgive me if I pronounce the first name right. In fact, tell me if I do. Jorgen Rasmussen from the International Maritime Organization. He's head of the Navigation Section, and since June 1997, and he is a real seaman. He spent 13 years at sea, and later was a radio officer, as a seaman and a radio officer, and for some reason decided to come inside. There may be a story in that, but we don't need to get into that today.

There's been a lot of talk today about how difficult it will be to get world shipping to adopt recorders, and at one point, I believe Admiral Lang said that the suspected reason, one of the suspected reasons is that many shipping companies feel they'll be embarrassed if marine accidents are investigated too carefully.

Perhaps you could give us an overview of the difficulties and whether Admiral Lang's comment is a legitimate worry.

MR. RASMUSSEN: Thanks a lot for that. I'll try to talk my way out of it.

First of all, I would like to say on behalf of my Secretary-General, Mr. William O'Neill, that we appreciate very much the invitation to come here to this symposium.

You will, I hope, all appreciate that the International Maritime Organization is our member governments, all 157 of them. The Secretariat is just that, a secretariat. We work a little bit differently from ICAO. We can't issue things like state letters. All of our decision procedures, all our considerations are taking place in committees and subcommittees, consisting of our member governments.

I think I should start out with very brief history of voyage data recorder within the IMO. Quite a number of years ago, we started discussing bulk carrier safety. You might recall that a number of bulk carriers disappeared without anybody ever finding out what really happened to them, and, of course, there was a lot of concern about that.

One outcome of that concern was what we call hull stress monitoring systems, which is today recommended to be fitted on bulk carriers. It's not primarily meant as a recorder system for accident investigation. It is primarily a tool for the master and his officers to monitor the situation of the ship's hull during loading, unloading conditions and things like that.

You have to realize another thing. In the maritime world, progress, new regulations are very often driven by accidents. It's sad to say, but that is the case. So, we had another accident. We had an accident with the ferry Estonia with a large loss of lives, and acting quite quickly and acting upon a recommendation of the Secretary-General of IMO, the IMO put together a panel of experts on roll-on passenger safety.

At that time, I hadn't joined the Secretariat. I was representing my government in the IMO, and I had a place on this panel of roll-on ferry safety because I was chairman of the Subcommittee on Radio Communications and Search and Rescue at that time. So, I was an ex officio member.

As a matter of fact, at that panel of experts, I came up with this proposal that we are now hopefully about to finalize; that is, to at least require the carriage of voyage data recorders on roll-on passenger ships.

In 1995, we held a conference to adopt a large number of amendments to our safety convention with regard to roll-on passenger ferries and other passenger ships, and I think it might be of interest to put that the conference expressed the following: being of the opinion that it would be desirable that ships, in particular passenger ships, are fitted with a voyage data recorder to assist in investigations into casualties. The conference then decided to invite the organization to do a lot of things.

But I think this expresses clearly the view of all the member governments present at the 1995 conference.

What the organization was invited to do was actually two things. First of all, to develop performance standards. It is the role of IMO to develop so-called functional requirements, and we issue them usually in the form of performance standards. Those are rather general and broad and are not really suitable for type approval procedures and testing methods.

That is why after IMO has adopted performance standards, the usual practices that one of the international standardization bodies, in this case the International Electric-Technical Commission or Committee, I think it is, either committee or commission, I tend to forget which, will follow up the work and come up with detailed technical standards, and that work is quite progressed at the moment.

They have issued the draft of the final draft standard. The date for closing of the vote will be the end of August, and hopefully before the end of this year, we'll have this technical standard. So, at least the industry, the manufacturing industry will know exactly what to do and to which standard to construct these voyage data recorders.

The second and maybe the most difficult part is to set out international carriage requirements for such equipment. You have heard from Captain Ross this morning and from Admiral Lang about some of the difficulties facing IMO.

You have to realize with 157 member governments, and the need to reach consensus, and that need is there because without a consensus, you can't really get any understanding and any following of any global standards or global requirements. If you try to force a vote which can happen but very, very rarely happens in IMO, if you try to do that, you will have winners and losers, and if you have losers, you'll have at least a group of people who are not really prepared to take up and follow the regulation that's been forced upon them. So, we find consensus is a very important thing.

With regard to these carriage requirements, arguments, a lot of arguments have been raised on both sides. One argument which has been repeated again and again is why spend a lot of time and effort on forcing through something which is not in the first instance directly safety prevention related?

I have heard a lot of arguments today, and I am one of the already converted. So, I don't -- I didn't really need to hear all the arguments again, but still it is something which we have to face in the organization in September, when our Subcommittee on Safety and Navigation is meeting again, and hopefully we'll finalize, among other things, this issue.

There are a number of other arguments. Another thing is if you look at are you going to try and force this requirement upon all ships on international voyages from a specific state? Are you going to have an implementation, going for certain types and classes of ships, certain sizes of ships, or whatever?

We have a number of proposals on the table for the September meeting, and it's going to be very interesting to see how it's going to turn out.

Thank you.

MR. PHILLIPS: Thank you. We have a number of excellent questions here that have been sent from the audience. Obviously we won't get to all of them. If your question doesn't get asked, I humbly apologize, but I'll get to as many of them as I can.

The first one naturally is to Jane Garvey, and -- and none of these are signed, Jane, but -

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: Could I have one of the not so excellent questions?

MR. PHILLIPS: The FAA has previously said that the 737 FDR recommendation would lead to grounding airplanes because the time table was so short. What has changed? How will the new recommendation affect the airlines?

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: Well, first of all, one of the points that I made is that we're going to be working very closely with the airline industry and work out a number of the sort of scheduling issues. I mean that's part of what the rulemaking allows. It allows for that kind of public discussion.

But we had some informal discussions, and we think while the schedules are ambitious, at least at this point, the information that we have, we believe it's doable. Southwest in particular has already begun a very aggressive effort, if you will, to expand the flight data recorders.

So, again while we think it's ambitious, we've laid it out. We've talked with some people informally, and the rulemaking process and procedures allows us to have to continue that discussion and to get the comments that we'll need to make the final decision.

MR. PHILLIPS: Okay. You'll notice that whenever she talks, I'm taking notes because I'm covering this very thing myself.

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: That was G-A-R-V-E-Y.

MR. PHILLIPS: With an "E" now?

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: Right.

MR. PHILLIPS: For sure. Okay. Fine. For Mr. Wykle, there are many commercially-available on-board recorders which meet the existing requirements of CFR 395.15, which I, of course, can quote by heart, and I'm sure you can, and have been available for 10 years.

Why are you not emphasizing them? Do you have any objections to the existing technology?

ADMINISTRATOR WYKLE: I'm not familiar with all the technology that's out there. I'm certainly aware that there are technologies available to do both the recording hours of service as well as record, I guess you would say, mechanical aspects of the vehicle, and I'm not philosophically opposed to any of those.

As I mentioned in my opening comments, we fully support and encourage and champion the application of technologies to record hours-of-service as well as mechanical aspects of the vehicle.

So, we're not prohibiting or limiting any of the technologies that are available.

MR. PHILLIPS: All right. This one is for Jolene Molitoris. Considering the benefits of cockpit voice recording systems stated by the aviation community, does the FRA see potential parallels in rail accident investigations? If so, please expand. If not, why not?

ADMINISTRATOR MOLITORIS: I think I mentioned that of all the recommendations from NTSB, the voice recorder recommendation was the one that was not fully embraced by the working group.

In fact, because there was a lot of discussion and thoughts about it, we actually separated out the issue of voice discussion so that we could have a meeting specifically focused on that.

Unfortunately, NTSB was not able to attend that meeting, and I am hopeful that they got good notes about everything that went on there.

But there was consensus, I think it was unanimous, by all the members that voice recording was not something that they wanted to include. They talked about a variety of things. What would it bring to the issues on a locomotive because it is different?

Of course, the first question I asked, Don, was, well, they do it in aviation, why not here, because, you know, we're working on one DOT and being as universal. I just finished being chairman of the Safety Council, and that's really the whole goal of the thing, is how can we really try and get safety requirements uniform as much as possible across the department, but the discussion was let's talk about how locomotives are different, and the operation of same is different.

There were issues around privacy. There were issues around what actual benefit would be gained by this, and at least in the working group, that was the result that they brought forward to us.

MR. PHILLIPS: All right. One for NHTSA, and you'll have to help me with an acronym here. Is it possible to achieve the presidential goal of 90 percent seatbelt usage by 2002 using EDRs? Could you explain to me what an EDR is first, and then -

MR. BISCHOFF: Electronic data recorder. EDR is event data recorders.

MR. PHILLIPS: Oh, okay. Fine. That's what we're talking about here. I should have known. Go ahead.

MR. BISCHOFF: And, of course, we have a seatbelt usage of about 70 percent right now, and we're looking for 90 percent as the questioner notes.

I suspect what they're referring to is that some of the EDRs that are on vehicles today can record the fact of whether the seatbelts were buckled or not. So, I suppose the inference is there that the police would use that as an enforcement tool, to hand out tickets after the fact, I guess, but that's certainly not one of our strategies to increase seatbelt use.

There are, as I mentioned before, there are a number of privacy and legal concerns about EDRs, and certainly we're trying to standardize event data recorders on vehicles right now, and eventually that may be a possibility, but that's certainly not one of our strategies that we have right now.

MR. PHILLIPS: Okay. Thank you. We're going to go over just a couple of minutes here to get a few more questions then since we got started a little late. I had dispensation at the beginning. I didn't tell you that, but we'll go over just a few minutes.

For the two maritime folks, is it feasible to encourage VDR installation on ships by deeming ships lacking VDRs unseaworthy and denying them docking rights?

ADMIRAL CARD: Is it feasible? Probably in this room it is. In the practical world, I don't think it's feasible to do that.

Jorgen and I, by the way, have worked together in the past many years on many of these issues for safety. He didn't mention it, but he had been with the Danish Maritime Authority before he came to the IMO.

So, when you're moving forward on a variety of different safety issues, you try to figure out the ones which are best and which you can move most quickly.

I think in the maritime world, the good news is yeah, it's going to happen. It's going to move forward. It may be on roll-on passenger vessels and passenger vessels before maybe it gets to bulk carriers, but then to do a sanction as you talked about or even to do the more unilateral action, why don't we just require it in the U.S. and everybody that comes here has to have it, etc.

We prefer when we can to work through the international organization. That's the best way to do it. So, that if you did it, it probably wouldn't last too long in the process. We go through a regulatory process to do that, and I don't know that we get to the end of that very easily.

MR. RASMUSSEN: Well, just maybe on a more formal note, on the legality of it, if we have a requirement, a carriage requirement, in our conventions, for an instrument, then, of course, you can argue if the ship is seaworthy or unseaworthy, if it's not equipped with that, but there's no doubt about it that it is substandard in such a case because it has to be fitted.

But I would say from my experience, that it would be very, very difficult to have a carriage requirement like this considered if it's not followed, consider a ship under this condition to be unseaworthy.

We have a precedent actually. We have something that looks like that. We have in Chapter 4 of our Safety Convention on Radio Communications Equipment a requirement for general radio communications, but we have a specific provision stating that if this part of the equipment is out of order, the ship is not considered as unseaworthy. That is the only place in the convention where we have something like that.

So, I tend to agree with Admiral Card that in the practical world, in the real world, no.

MR. PHILLIPS: Thank you. Two more questions. One that doesn't go directly to recorders, but I know that the Safety Board has mentioned before as safety problem for RSPA.

Will excavation damage of pipelines be addressed by putting teeth in practical enforcement on a local level so violations of the laws become prohibitive? I hope I got that right. It was scratched out a little bit there. Go ahead.

ADMINISTRATOR COYNER: Outside force damage is the single greatest cause of pipeline failures regardless of what kind of system you're talking about. Transmission lines for gas and liquid, our local distribution systems, the way we get our gas into our homes.

We have spent a great deal of time focusing on this issue, ranging from new regulations requiring pipeline operators to participate in these systems, and working with our states in terms of improving their education and enforcement posture.

What we are engaged in right now is a very large effort involving over a 150 different experts from a variety of different areas, including law enforcement, to look at what the best practices are to avoid damage to the pipeline, whether it's the way the One-Call System works, how you go out and mark the line and dig, but also enforcement, what the best enforcement practices are, and that effort will come to a conclusion in a joint symposium sponsored by the NTSB on June 30th.

After that, we will implement a new grants program authorized under the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, known, of course, to most of us as TEA-21, and we think that that will allow states to move forward in not only having better practices on the prevention side but also strengthening their enforcement capabilities as well.

MR. PHILLIPS: Thank you. And one more for

Jane Garvey. Is any thought being given to real-time download of data, I assume this means from FDRs, to store and archive for use by the airlines, the FAA, and the NTSB? Will this be phased in along with improved recorders?

ADMINISTRATOR GARVEY: On Wednesday, I guess I'll be back to talk about even some of the other sort of huge -- I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to say then, so that you all come. But we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the futuristic and some of the other ideas that people have in technology, and I think all of those issues are going to be very much a part of the discussion.

MR. PHILLIPS: Thank you all, and thank each of you very much.