GovernmentExecutive.com

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be a vote to continue to subject the American public to a steady stream of aircraft near-misses and near-disasters, such incidents occurring in epic numbers since Bobby Sturgell took over as Acting FAA Administrator half-a-year ago last fall.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be an imprimatur for further profligate federal spending, just like the US$53,500,000+ which Sturgell and his FAA cohorts already blew on the failed piece of software known as the NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign. This Redesign has been called but a Band-Aid Solution by FAA's own COO Hank Krakowski. The Redesign wasn't even originally engendered as a means to increase air-travel efficiency. The Redesign was first set in motion by NY-area air traffic controllers as a way to steer more air traffic their way from Boston and towards their own economic advantage. The Redesign was then re-purposed, re-tooled, and re-tread by Sturgell and FAA, once Sturgell and FAA realized they could use it to pad the pockets of their aero-mercantile cronies, and likely to their own personal economic advantage once they left the agency in the same manner that Made Marion Blakey recently did.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be a vote for a failed bureaucrat and failed agency that acts in blind and purposeful ignorance of Homeland Security concerns.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would sanction the further trampling of citizen due process rights of notice, opportunity to be heard, and meaningful involvement in the political process. The ONLY reason Quiet Rockland became active over the past year was because the FAA purposefully denied Rockland County residents those due process rights in the first instance. The time which the federal government now spends responding to Quiet Rockland, is effectively time that Bobby Sturgell has stolen from them, too, just like he has stolen from me the last year of my life spent in opposing him and his failed regime of aerocracy.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be authorization for the FAA to continue to abrogate environmental justice. In Rockland County, NY, if you are African-American, Jewish, working-class, or lower-income, then you can virtually bet that the FAA is seeking to fly low-altitude jumbo-jet aircraft over your head and home up to 600 times per day, and then lie to you when telling you that it was only the software and not FAA personnel that chose the flown-over neighborhoods. This is racism and classism by air. This will not be tolerated in the United States of America.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA will ensure that aircraft repair will continue to be outsourced to facilities in foreign countries, with little or no screening procedures in effect to ensure that mechanic-enemies of our country will be kept away those planes. That is an outrage.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would tell American citizens that it is absolutely normal for multiple major airlines like Southwest, United, and American to keep grounding hundreds if not thousands of aircraft for safety reasons while thereby stalling hundreds of thousands of passengers.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would tell American citizens that they were not at all put at risk when Southwest Airlines and Sturgell's FAA allowed hundreds of thousands of them to fly in un-inspected and in some cases cracked aircraft, at risk of rudder-control failure. Fuselage cracks comprise the same defect which caused loss of life in the Aloha Airlines disaster of 1988. During the recent Southwest crisis, Sturgell's FAA all the while told us we were never safer. Bobby Sturgell's initials of B.S. were never more appropriate.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would sanctify a regime wherein false federal filings are made, telling ersatz federal regulators that hazardous planes had already been grounded when in fact they had not. The wink-and-nod between regulator and regulated, must stop, now.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be tantamount to telling the American people that it is OK for the agency which is the regulator of our air safety, to be under federal and indeed FBI investigation for among other things threatening aviation safety inspector whistleblowers. That’s something a drug cartel would do.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would tell us that it is OK to run a federal agency like a P.R.-firm rather than a responsible arms-length regulator objectively protecting our health and safety. A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would tell us that it is OK for an agency and the airlines to work together to enlist a goon-squad of spelling-challenged Internet bloggers to hit the message boards and tell the American people that air travel was never safer, whilst planes are falling apart in un-inspected disrepair, and passengers are being continually put in further harm’s way.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be the Senate’s indication to Mr. Sturgell that the Senate has somehow forgotten all about how he lied under oath, committed perjury, and acted in contempt of Congress on February 8, 2008 before the CS and T Committee.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would sanction the recidivist arrogance, non-responsiveness, equivocation, and evasiveness that characterizes Mr. Sturgell's management style and that of his failed agency's current management.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would send a message to flyers that it is OK that airplane parts fly off in mid-flight and strike the passenger windows inches from their face; that is OK for an airline to deny a dying passenger oxygen when she needs it; and that it is totally understandable for an in-flight pilot's side-arm to be shot off while landing, puncturing a hole in the cockpit.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be a revival of the Oberstar-decried and Schiavo-decried Tombstone Mentality of the Tombstone Agency, the notion that ‘If the plane doesn't crash, we're doing great’; the notion that a federal agency is not required to anticipate and navigate around safety problems, but is instead only required to react if and when there is already a tombstone and post facto.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would be consistent with supporting other failed federal agencies such as FEMA, HUD, and the Fed. Yesterday's Helluva Job Brownie has now become today's Helluva Job Bobby.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would say it is OK for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to revolt in anger against the FAA. Yet it is very much in this country's interests to keep the Teamsters happy.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would say it is OK for FAA’s own aircraft inspectors to revolt against the FAA, too. The inspectors are right. FAA management is wrong.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would give a blessing to the continued anti-competitive and perpetual abuse by Sturgell and FAA of the most prized possession of the FAA workforce, the noble and skilled air traffic controllers who every day save the lives of passengers in the air, despite while enduring sub-human working conditions and the continued malicious FAA endeavor to break their own labor union.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would mean it is OK for a true solo-pilot to have no idea how to handle his labor force - and for an FAA to tell controllers that if they think the NY/NJ/PHL Redesign is unsafe, then they can go look for work elsewhere.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would sanction safety-disasters-in-the-making at places like Florida radar and control towers, and LAX runways.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would retroactively sanctify Sturgell’s failure to timely implement NextGen technology, which put further of our lives at risk thereby.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would work as a continued approval of the unlawful misconduct of an FAA Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) unit that continues to conceal, lie, deceive, and falsify documents.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would consecrate the further training of pilots at U.S.-based flight schools who themselves could be enemies dead-set on harming our country. That's how 9/11 happened in the first place, and given Sturgell's demonstrable contempt for the northeast, he doesn't seem to mind.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would stand for the principle that it is OK for an agency to be required to audit safety documents and safety compliance, only after they have been caught not doing same in the first instance over a period of many years. The compliance and enforcement measures taken now by FAA should have been done all along!

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would tell any one of us that, yes, we, too, can grow up the son of J. Edgar Hoover's personal secretary, in a family-owned biker-bar in Deale Maryland where biker recruiting-sessions and gunshots occur, and where outdoor signs are tolerated to post which insult patrons who are bikers, male homosexuals, and African-Americans, and then we can grow up to head a federal agency using a lawless yahoo-sounding undignified nickname like Bobby while running the place like the Dukes of Hazzard - just as long as once Quiet Rockland figures out it is our family that owns that biker bar, we put the biker bar up for sale on Craig's List before anyone else might hear about it.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would tell us that prudence only dictates anything AFTER we have been caught, and never BEFORE we have been first caught asleep at the switch.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would say it is OK for a regulator to totally fail to regulate.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would indicate to the American people that they should simply stomach and not object to - in the words of Rep. Oberstar when speaking about Southwest and the FAA - the worst safety lapse at FAA he has seen during all of his 23 years on the job.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would send all of us the message that it is perfectly normal for the Inspector General; the Government Accountability Office as the investigative arm of Congress; the United States Senate, the United States House of Representatives; the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology; the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure; civil litigators and the courts in 13 now-consolidated federal court actions; and even now the FBI; to all be investigating the same failed federal agency at the same time.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would tell federal agencies that it is OK to collaborate with other federal agencies like NASA so as to purposefully obfuscate and conceal needed flight-safety data from the American people, and then release it on New Year's Eve when it is hoped that every citizen will be watching the ball drop instead of paying attention to the results.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would mean that is just fine to purposefully over-saturate and over-schedule the skies, and then blame the American traveler for it, instead of rightfully blaming the pecuniary greed of the aeromercantile complex which really caused the delays and inefficiencies.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would mean it is OK for an agency-head to lie to the President of the United States himself and tell the President that an airspace redesign would create a 20% efficiency savings across all flights, when the agency's own harbinger told communities not but a few weeks prior that the same redesign would only stand to save 3 minutes per flight.

A vote for a Bobby Sturgell FAA would further shake and threaten the American economy, and further give other economic competitors in countries like China, Germany, Japan, India and elsewhere the further leg-up, at a time in history when we need to compete as opposed to be led by inept agency bureaucrats and be laughed at by those countries.

The talent pool is deeper than this. There is more to leadership than wearing aviator glasses. We have an ugly aviation safety crisis and scandal on our hands. Let's wash our hands of it.

Let’s wash our hands of Bobby Sturgell and his failed administration.

Quiet Rockland further urges Congress to restore the faith of Americans and of the world, in the American aviation system. This is a great country that can be even greater. The FAA’s cozy relationship with the airlines and the agency's abject failure to regulate, must end NOW.

And as for how to dispose of the very progenitor of that cozy relationship, we again ask all members of the United States Congress to Just Say No to Bobby Sturgell.

Respectfully submitted,

John J. Tormey III, Esq.
Quiet Rockland - No New Flights Over Rockland County, NY