The FAA’s oversight of regional carrier SkyWest is falling short of the agency’s own standards, according to a report from the U.S. Transportation Department’s inspector general.
The report concluded that the FAA Certificate Management Office overseeing SkyWest’s maintenance programs “does not always adhere to FAA guidance when addressing SkyWest’s noncompliance.” It faulted the CMO for directing inspectors to use nonstandard methods to achieve compliance and failing to identify recurring problems that should have been labeled systemic.
The report highlighted repeated noncompliance issues in SkyWest’s remote return to service maintenance practices, which have been going on for over four years.
“These problems indicate that the CMO’s efforts to ensure that SkyWest resolved identified noncompliances were not effective,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, based on our analysis, the recurrence of issues with remote return to service maintenance suggests that the problem should have been identified and addressed as a systemic hazard.”
The inspector general also called attention to the sometimes lengthy delays the CMO encountered while trying to obtain critical safety data from SkyWest. There is no automated system to facilitate the sharing of this data, and the CMO relies on requests for information filed with SkyWest. While SkyWest responds to the majority of the requests in a timely fashion, the report found, some requests experienced delays ranging between 60 to nearly 120 days, slowing the resolution of compliance issues.
SkyWest is the largest regional airline in the U.S. Based in St. George, Utah, it operates flights through service agreements with United, Delta, American, and Alaska.
“Safety is SkyWest’s highest priority and the foundation of all we do,” the carrier said in a statement. “We are committed to maintaining the highest standards of safety and compliance across all aspects of our operation. The OIG report found the local Certificate Management’s Office (CMO’s) oversight does not comply with FAA guidance. In recent years and over several changes in CMO leadership and personnel, we’ve taken numerous actions to help the CMO identify and resolve any issues in either of our processes to better support SkyWest’s safety efforts.”
“We appreciate the national Federal Aviation Administration’s emphasis on a collaborative approach to problem solving with the goal of enhancing safety, and we remain committed to working with our local CMO in the pursuit of safety excellence,” the statement continued.
The inspector general’s office said it initiated the review on its own after discovering similar shortcomings in the FAA’s oversight of carriers like American, Southwest, and Allegiant.
Recommendations
The report issued seven recommendations, including providing training to managers and inspectors on how to identify and resolve systematic hazards. It also recommended improving internal communications, closely adhering to compliance escalation and resolution procedures, and helping inspectors more carefully categorize the noncompliance issues they find.
The FAA was shown a draft of the inspector general’s report in May and earlier this month provided a response in which it fully concurred with all but one of the recommendations. It took issue with a directive to establish “clear procedures on how Certificate Management Offices should address significant delays in obtaining air carrier data,” because implementing a single set of procedures would be, in its view, unworkable.
“The FAA agrees that clear procedures are important,” the agency said. “However, CMOs differ in how they interact with operators, making a uniform procedure impractical. Given the complexities, a standardized process could disrupt effective local practices and limit the flexibility needed to address the varied contexts of FAA data requests.”
Instead of mandating a uniform approach, the FAA continued, each CMO will review its procedures for requesting and escalating information requests, revise them as needed, and communicate those changes to staff by June 2026.
