Sean Broderick covers aviation safety, MRO, and the hardware side of the airline business from Aviation Week Network's Washington, D.C. office.
Broderick's aviation career started in 1991, working for Airbus in Toulouse. His industry experience includes four years with an aviation consultancy, where he helped launch a U.S. Part 121 carrier; 12 years with the American Association of Airport Executives, where he served as editor of Airport Magazine; and 20 years in full- and part-time roles with Aviation Week writing primarily about safety and the aftermarket.
Broderick was named the 2020 Aerospace Journalist of the Year by the Aerospace Media Awards. He also shared in a 2020 Neal Award for Best News Coverage with Aviation Week Network colleagues. Broderick and Aviation Week colleague John Croft shared the 2015 Flight Safety International Cecil A. Brownlow Publication Award recognizing "significant contributions by journalists to aviation safety awareness."
He graduated from James Madison University with a B.S. in Communications ('91) and earned an M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications ('13) from West Virginia University.
FAA, responding to a Department of Transportation (DOT) Office of the Inspector General (IG) audit, has pledged to tweak the way it conducts repair station oversight in an effort to match an increase in airline reliance on outsourcing. But don't look for any sea-changes. Most of the IG's recommendations -- and FAA's pledges -- should sound familiar to the MRO world: improve quality of data collection; make that data more widely available to FAA inspectors via various databases; and ensure foreign repair stations are following FAA regulations, to name a few.
Third-party maintenance issues recently have assumed an uncommonly high profile in Washington aviation circles as an association took a long-running battle over instructions for continued airworthiness (ICA) to the most powerful hill in the land, and investigators dug deeper into the January crash of an Air Midwest Beech 1900 (see p. 22). The ICA effort, led by the Aeronautical Repair Station Association (ARSA), has been the more promising development for overhaul shops. As O&M went to press, the U.S. House of Representatives' version of Flight 100 -- H.R.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is concerned that certain fuselage repairs could be masking fatigue cracks that, if left undetected, may pose structural failure risks to aircraft. The board recommended that FAA tackle the problem with rulemaking and education of technical personnel. NTSB's concern stems from the still-open probe into the May 2002 in-flight breakup of China Airlines Flight 611, a Boeing 747-200, over the Taiwan Straits.
