The Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently completed an investigation into the alleged harassment of a Missouri pilot, Joseph Brinell, by the FAA. The report found that personnel at the Kansas City Flight Standards District Office (FSDO), including a supervisor, had indeed abused their authority in their dealings with Brinell. The OIG only initiated its investigation after it found that the FAA's own probe into the affair was biased in favor of the FAA personnel involved and that it contained "troubling irregularities."
While under normal circumstances the FAA's alleged mistreatment of a pilot wouldn't warrant headlines, in this case the pilot in question was at the controls of a Cessna CitationJet that crashed while on a GPS approach to a small airport in Point Lookout, Missouri, on December 9, 1999. Brinell died in the crash, along with five others.
In its June, 2001 final report on the crash, the NTSB cited pilot error-Brinell, the report says, descended below the minimum altitude-as the cause. But in what is, to our knowledge, an unprecedented finding, the Board cited as a contributing factor the stress that Brinell was under due to the ongoing, unwanted attention from the FAA.
That attention is the subject of the OIG report, which was requested by Missouri congressman Roy Blunt after Brinell's widow raised concerns about the credibility of the FAA's internal probe.
The OIG's report states that over the course of approximately nine months, the unnamed supervisor and others at the Kansas City FSDO initiated a series of "unwarranted" actions against Brinell, who was then the Director of Aviation for the College of the Ozarks. Brinell, who had been with the college for 28 years and had acted as a designated examiner for 26 years, had an unblemished FAA record.
According to the report, the Kansas City FSDO supervisor who initiated actions against Brinell told a friend of the pilot that Brinell did not "give me the respect that I deserve as a Supervisor" and that "We are going to change that."
The FSDO first moved against Brinell in March of 1999, when it sought to revoke his designated flight examiner status. FAA superiors rejected the attempt.
