FLYING INTO TROUBLE

(4 of 16)

More than a year later, in the days after TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, the public, politicians, investigators and grieving family members waited tensely while scuba divers searched for clues. Eventually the recorder was found, its body remarkably undamaged. But it played back only a millisecond of a mysterious loud noise. The box was one of the old models, and didn't have the extra capacity to record in the midst of a catastrophe like the one on TWA Flight 800.

The FAA regularly told the NTSB that it couldn't have anything on its wish list of safety measures because of cost considerations. It told the same thing to the Inspector General, Congress and the White House. It reassured the public with the mantra "Accidents are not happening; planes are not falling out of the sky."

Yet they are, and the danger is growing. In one meeting I attended, the FAA said that shortly after the turn of the century, aircraft accidents will increase dramatically. The officials [who were making the case for increased FAA funding] said matter-of-factly that if demand for flights increases at present rates and if growth of discount airlines keeps up at the current pace, we can expect a major crash every week or so after the turn of the century.

Stunned, I wanted to study the data. (At the close of the meeting, FAA officials collected all of the documents they'd shown us at the session.) Where had the figures come from, how had they been interpreted and substantiated, and what were the airlines planning to do about it? More important, what did the FAA plan to do to prevent all these crashes?

I asked the FAA to send me the graphs and any supporting research. The reply was swift: no such data existed, I was told. No charts or graphs like that here, the FAA said. In fact, no such research had been done, no such conclusions reached. But I'd seen them, I argued; I'd held them in my hands! That didn't matter; suddenly none of the officials knew what I was talking about.

Over the next years, I learned firsthand that, sadly, withholding information was routine for the FAA. Fortunately, the Boeing Co. made similar statistics public in a study that said, "If, as we expect, air traffic is to double in the 1990s, we need to reduce by half our accident rate just to hold our own."

WHY THE VALUJET TRAGEDY DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN

It would take the deaths of more than a hundred people aboard a ValuJet plane that burst into flames, smashed into the Florida Everglades and sank in a murky swamp to expose chronic weaknesses in the FAA. The 110 souls on that flight probably never knew what caused the fire that took their lives. At first, government investigators could not pinpoint the reason for the disaster, either. [It was later found that the fire was apparently caused by dangerous oxygen generators loaded into the cargo bay without being carefully handled according to regulations.] But the tragedy would expose what the FAA had long known: ValuJet was primed for a major crash; its maintenance was slipshod; it had an accident rate 14 times as poor as those of its peers; its managers were out of their league; and the FAA's own inspectors had wanted ValuJet shut down months before the Everglades disaster.