The reorganization of the FAA's Flight Standards office, announced last August, was prompted by the 5,000-employee service's well-known reputation for being inconsistent between regions and the need to be considerably more nimble in the face of faster technological change. That was the message from executive director John Duncan at Heli-Expo, where he gave an update on the progress of the sweeping reorganization.
“You'd ask one question on one side of the country and not get the same answer that you got on the other side of the country for the same set of circumstances. We had to do something about that. We could not survive in the long run with that inconsistent kind of delivery. Secondly, we have to be more efficient in the way we do business. There is a lot of work out there. We have to leverage the resources we have. That means the funding resources as well as using the people we have and reaching out to industry and leveraging industry and get the work done that needs to be done. We also need to be agile enough to change as the industry changes and keep up with what is going on. So that is where we are headed,” he said.
“The first iteration of that is consistency. We must be interdependent as a team and talking to each other within our organization, not operating independently in a field office somewhere. That means we had to change the mindset of the 5,000 people in the flight standards organization, build a different skill set, and build the tools that are necessary to get this done.” Duncan enumerated some of those tools: leadership training, change management, coaching, and “mutual learning” to “move the culture.”
The second part of the equation was reorganizing flight standards to support the cultural realignment, replacing the old eight-region system, which had “a history of being relatively independent” and “doing the same thing and all coming up sometimes with different answers to the same question.” That involved restructuring along four functional lines: air carrier safety assurance; general aviation safety assurance that now includes all the flight standards district offices (FSDOs) in the country; a single safety standards organization responsible for all of the standards development, policy, rulemaking, and dissemination; and a a fourth organization called foundation of business that handles budget, personnel, registry, and training. He said the reorganization did not involve moving any people and approximately half of the leadership is located outside of Washington, with ample field experience and support for their new roles.
Duncan said effecting this type of cultural and structural change “takes a little bit of time” and asked for the audience's “help and feedback about the folks in my organization.”
“I expect they [flight standards] will be working in partnership with you to get to the goal you're headed for, as long as you can meet the appropriate standards. I expect them to recognize that there are multiple ways to comply with regulation and I expect them to be in conversation looking for solutions.
"If you find yourself in a situation where that is not happening, or where you have a disagreement, I would ask you to bring someone else into the conversation to help. We have the capability to do that. Working together we can get this done in a much more efficient and practical way. That's our job. To fix the problem, not to punish,” he said.
Duncan acknowledged that there is still institutional resistance to change. “We are working with a cultural change. People change at different rates, and we have the challenge of dealing with people who do not change at the same rates as others. Over time that will accelerate, as the new structure will [enable] folks who have been isolated in the past to come along with the change. There are a lot of good people out there who do need to change, and we will work through those issues.”
Despite the reorganization, Duncan said local points of contact have not changed and that the FAA has created a rapid response team to answer any questions that cannot be handled via that channel. The team can be reached at (888) 283-8944 or via Email: FlightStandardsRRT@faa.gov.