(FORTUNE Magazine) – Wouldn't it be nice to be certain that the person occupying the captain's seat of your airliner wasn't voted "Most Likely to Auger In" at pilot school? Incredibly, when a pilot applies for a new job, crucial information--say, whether he or she can actually fly a plane skillfully--is usually inaccessible to the potential employer. Reason? An airline company that passes along tales of flunked flight tests and poor performance could be sued for invasion of privacy.

This silence has a horrible price: dozens of lives, the result of disasters caused by pilot ineptitude. Most recently, an American Airlines commuter flight crashed near Raleigh in late 1994 when the pilot mistakenly thought that an engine had failed. Turns out the guy quit his previous job after the airline found him unfit to fly. American never knew.

In the wake of that calamity, the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that investigates airline accidents, begged Congress to respond, having failed earlier to persuade the Federal Aviation Administration to recommend a legislative solution.

Result: New bills are now before the Senate and the House that would shelter airlines from liability for sharing performance records. Pilots would be able to inspect the records for errors. A bill is expected to pass this spring.

One current conflict between the bills is over who should keep track of the records, the airlines--each of which administers its own individual training tests--or the government. FAA administrator David Hinson, who's steadily streamlining the agency, wants nothing to do with it. "It doesn't belong with a government agency," he says. To him, employment records are a company matter.

The Air Line Pilots Association, the union that represents most major airlines' pilots, also wants the records kept away from the FAA. ALPA President Randolph Babbitt told the House aviation subcommittee, "[Public] access will result in comparisons of airlines based on flight crew training performance, which the media and the public would undoubtedly and incorrectly infer to represent the relative safety of these respective carriers."

ALPA also frets that nonstandardized, subjective evaluations will make fair analysis difficult. Arizona Senator John McCain, a sponsor of one bill, disagrees: "Records won't necessarily be a cause for rejection. All we're saying is that they should be part of the decision-making process."

More crucial, ALPA points out that the bill will affect only pilots who are moving from one job to another. How, ALPA asks, are bad pilots getting into the system in the first place? Really good question. The armed forces once trained most pilots who eventually flew commercial. High standards kept out the riffraff. Now only a third of all commercial pilots are military veterans. So ALPA is calling for tougher performance standards for entry-level jobs. Which stands to reason. Solidarity is great, but no one wants to share a cockpit with a bonehead.

--Ronald B. Lieber