FAA ALERTS MAJOR U.S. AIR CARRIERS FOLLOWING

CBS4, KCNC-TV-DENVER, DIA DEICING INVESTIGATION

DENVER, CO-The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued an alert to major U.S. air carriers after an exclusive story about dubious deicing practices broke on CBS4, KCNC-TV, the CBS owned and operated station in Denver last night.

CBS4 Investigative Reporter Brian Maass' exclusive undercover investigation discovered inadequate deicing training by DIA's largest deicing company. Applicants training to become certified deicers were provided with 400 questions and 400 spoon-fed answers, in fact all of the answers to test questions administered for 22 airlines, from Continental Airlines to Frontier Airlines, serviced at DIA. The deicers, or "icemen" as they are called, are the people who work on the airplanes to make sure they are ice-free in the final moments prior to take-off.

In the rush to hire 500 deicers for DIA this winter, testing provided by Servisair, one of the world's largest operators in aviation ground services, made sure every DIA applicant could pass every exam and become a deicer, no matter how little they understood about deicing, by giving them the answers.

"What we are exposing here has sparked an FAA investigation," Brian Maass said. "In 2005, the FAA released a document saying ground deicing programs are critical to aviation safety and the consequences of a program failure can be catastrophic. DIA is looking into what we found and major airlines are angry."

CBS4 sent an employee undercover to apply for a job as a deicer with Servisair. Using a hidden camera, the employee documented Servisair instructors, after a couple of hours of instruction, giving the answers to questions on 14 tests for 22 different airlines so there was no chance of failing. These tests were supposed to determine who learned this complicated procedure and who is ready for the job, but the instructor provided every answer to every question and even had students intentionally make mistakes on the Continental Airlines test since that airline, which suffered a devastating Denver plane crash in 1987, carefully checks these tests and might get suspicious if all of the answers were correct.

According to a Frontier Airlines executive, an airline Servisair deices for, the instructor in that room failed to properly train the employees and an airline cannot accept that risk.

Servisair says it has deiced hundreds of thousands of planes safely and calls what CBS4 found isolated. In addition to the alert given to major U.S. air carriers, the FAA is also now combing through Servisair tests and records and could fine the company or hand out more serious penalties.

Since CBS4 showed Servisair what the station found, they immediately ordered 500 deicers back for retraining with properly administered tests and they say they are auditing their deicing operations around the U.S. to make sure what we found has not been happening at other airports where they operate.

CBS4 uncovered Servisair cheating at DIA in other ways, also. Part two of CBS4's exclusive investigation airs tonight. For more information, watch CBS4 News at 10 p.m. or visit www.cbs4denver.com.

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