FLYING INTO TROUBLE

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In 1994, 68 people died when an Avions de Transport regional plane, flown by American Eagle, crashed into a soybean field in Roselawn, Indiana. A design flaw made the French-Italian plane become violently uncontrollable in cold weather. Pilots and aeronautical engineers knew what the problem was: the de-icing boots on the ATR wings were not big enough. Those are the rubber sleeves on each wing that can be expanded to crack sheets of ice. But the FAA determined that lengthening the boot would cost too much money. It took three plane crashes, the third one scattering human remains and debris over eight acres of Indiana farmland on Halloween, before the FAA ordered extension of the deicing boot and limits to ATR flights in icy weather.

It also took a fatal plane crash for the FAA to heed years of evidence showing that the distance between planes landing at an airport should be increased. For years, the National Transportation Safety Board [the independent agency that investigates plane accidents] told the FAA to increase the distance between jets. The board studied 51 accidents caused by wake turbulence from 1983 to 1993. Twenty-seven people had been killed, and 40 planes had been damaged or destroyed. In those years, the NTSB repeatedly asked the FAA to set new rules, but the FAA refused. It would be three years more before the FAA ruled that the separation between heavy and lighter aircraft should be increased.

Since 1982, the NTSB has urged the FAA to order airlines to install better black boxes [the flight-data recorders that can provide clues to the cause of an accident]. All the NTSB wanted was black boxes that can continue recording for fractions of a second beyond a catastrophic explosion or massive electrical failure aboard an airplane. European airlines have used such advanced black-box technology for years. That means many American planes flying to Europe have the advanced boxes. But the FAA did not want to compel airlines to install improved boxes. No, the agency declared, the new technology would cost the airlines too much money.

The NTSB was especially keen to have the boxes installed on Boeing 737s. Investigations of two accidents involving B-737s--one outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1991 and the other in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1994--have been seriously hampered by the lack of this information. Instead of pressing the airlines to find an economical way to install new black boxes and instead of sending its own investigators to challenge the airlines' assessment of the cost, the FAA simply embraced the carriers' argument that the project would be too pricey.

"Had the FAA and the industry begun the implementation of this recommendation in March 1995," when the NTSB originally made the request, said NTSB chairman Jim Hall at the end of the following month, "most Boeing 737s would have been retrofitted with an acceptable, short-term, improved recording capability by this time. The lack of FAA action to date is unacceptable."