Flying Blind, Flying Safe.

• Author: Poole, Robert W., Jr.

If you've been paying any attention to airline safety during the past year, you could hardly have missed Mary Schiavo. The controversial former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation was a frequent guest on TV talk shows in the wake of the ValuJet and TWA crashes, and advance publicity for her book this spring included a major segment on 60 Minutes and extensive excerpts in Time.

To some, Mary Schiavo is a courageous bureaucracy fighter who has finally told the public the truth about the incompetence of the Federal Aviation Administration. To others, including many aviation veterans, she is a "loose cannon." The truth is that she's some of each. Which makes her book, Flying Blind, Flying Safe, both valuable and frustrating.

Only an outsider-insider like Schiavo could provide ordinary people with authentic accounts of how badly off-track the FAA has gotten in its job of looking after aviation safety. As both a private pilot and a powerful Transportation Department bureaucrat armed with subpoena power, she knew enough to ask the questions that needed to be asked and to find the skeletons in the FAA's closet. But as a woman and a nonmember of the old boys' network of retired generals and admirals who circulate in the FAA's upper echelons, she was able to bring a fresh perspective to this troubled agency.

Thus, this is the first popular book to lift the veil and show air travelers how the FAA really operates. Schiavo shows the agency's corporate culture in action - starting with the administrator's butler, ceremonial office, and unlimited access to cockpit time in the agency's huge fleet of planes. More substantive are her accounts of Inspector General's Office investigations of such safety issues as shoddy FAA inspection practices and the use of "bogus" aircraft parts (parts not made by approved vendors and possibly made of inadequate materials). She provides chilling evidence of an agency whose people all too often simply go through the motions of regulating, but whose overriding concern appears to be throwing a comforting security blanket over air travelers.

Noting the very small number of violations turned up by FAA inspectors (less than 0.5 percent of inspections identified a violation), Schiavo learned that it was routine for the inspectors to call the inspectees in advance to let them know when they were coming. By contrast, special inspections, which used inspectors from other FAA regions, generally turned up far...