flying cheap COMMENTS comments  Interview: Nick Sabatini
“There's a strong effort now to assure FAA people that they can
come forward. Don't be concerned about any retribution; there
won't be any.”  He is a former Federal Aviation Administration
associate administrator for aviation safety and currently an
aviation consultant. This is the edited transcript of an
interview conducted on Oct. 22, 2009.  While you were there,
what was your impression of the relationship between the FAA and
the entities it set out to regulate?  That's a great question,
because there was a significant transition from the time when I
first joined the FAA. There was a relationship which was not
conducive to producing the best possible result for the public.
It was a relationship where certificated entities would be very
reluctant to talk to the FAA and talk about what they were
seeing in terms of what needed to be addressed. So things were
underground, so to speak.  In fact, I recall -- and many of my
colleagues had the same experien