Transportation Safety

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The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) announced an extension of the comment period for proposed new alcohol and drug testing requirements for railroad maintenance workers. The regulations, which were unveiled in July, would mean an expansion of drug and alcohol testing that is already in place for conductors, engineers and dispatchers. 

A supervisor who raised safety concerns after a driver was told to pull a trailer without a valid license plate was wrongfully terminated, according to OSHA, which has ordered Stericycle Inc.of Wichita, Kansas to reinstate the employee.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday issued a special investigation report on the recent increase in deaths of railroad and rail transit roadway workers on or near tracks and made recommendations to reduce the number of fatalities.

The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is launching a new Car Seat Finder Tool, adding the ability to look up car seat recalls on its mobile app, and reminding parents and caregivers to register their child’s car seat through its new campaign – "Don’t Delay. Register Your Car Seat Today."

If you plan on buying a Ferrari, Lamborghini or Jaguar, you don’t need to worry that your vehicle doesn’t meet federal safety standards. Those makes and others will be allowed to be imported into the U.S., even though they don’t fully comply with safety requirements, under an exemption announced recently by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has ordered Grand Ridge, Fla.-based Ken’s Trucking, LLC, USDOT No. 1050616, to immediately shut down following a federal investigation that revealed numerous widespread violations of critical safety regulations.

The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) is backing the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) effort to encourage states to reduce the legal standard of driver impairment due to alcohol consumption, as measured by blood-alcohol content (BAC), from 0.08% to 0.05%.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has released preliminary aviation accident statistics which show an overall decline in the number of US registered civil aviation accidents. The number of civil aviation accidents fell from 1,539 in 2012 to 1,297 in 2013.

Today the National Transportation Safety Board determined that UPS flight 1354 crashed because the crew continued an unstabilized approach into Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport in Birmingham, Ala. In addition, the crew failed to monitor the altitude and inadvertently descended below the minimum descent altitude when the runway was not yet in sight.

In a study on the prevalence of drug use by pilots who died in crashes, the NTSB found an upward trend in the use of both potentially impairing medications and illicit drugs. Almost all of the crashes – 96 percent – were in general aviation.