FLYING INTO TROUBLE

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Some of the stories, Weintrob recalled, were too outrageous to believe at first. Crews on a jet complained about a broken weather radar system 31 times before it was fixed; when a Boston flight had a stuck landing gear, the plane was diverted to the Washington area, but on the way, the landing gear started working again, so the crew continued to fly without taking the plane in to be serviced; mechanics used duct tape to patch planes; a mechanic wielded a hammer and chisel to fix a sensitive engine part, and later that engine had to be shut down in flight.

Some individual ValuJet planes had chronic problems. It would not have been difficult for inspectors [in the Atlanta FAA office] to go over ValuJet records and trace these persistent breakdowns. Instead, the Atlanta inspectors seemed unimpressed with the summary [of problems compiled by Weintrob]. The number of accidents and incidents was not "disproportionate," they said. There was no common link between them. The FAA had no special plans for ValuJet.

But Weintrob's visit apparently prompted the FAA's Atlanta office to think twice about its conclusions and conduct its own quick re-evaluation of the ValuJet safety record.

A few days after [our investigators' visit], the Atlanta FAA staff wrote a memo to headquarters. For eight pages, they described accidents and poor FAA surveillance until reaching an inevitable conclusion so startling and obvious that it should have changed history--except that it was also a conclusion so threatening to ValuJet and contrary to FAA habit that the memo was immediately buried, secreted away until disaster forced it into the open.

That disaster came three months later, on May 11, when ValuJet Flight 592 plunged into the Everglades.

After the crash, government officials began appearing on television to reassure the public that discount airlines were safe to fly. Top officials at the Department of Transportation shifted quickly into crisis-management mode. Secretary Federico Pena drew on his own experience flying ValuJet to reassure the public on national television: "I have flown ValuJet. ValuJet is a safe airline, as is our entire aviation system." Pena insisted that "if ValuJet was unsafe, we would have grounded it."

In an agitated, defensive voice, Pena said an FAA report proved that discount airlines were as safe as the major carriers. But Pena had to know this simply wasn't true. He was protecting an airline just the way government officials had for decades. In fact, the FAA had an avalanche of evidence that proved that ValuJet had been troubled for months and that other marginal airlines were just as unsafe. Conclusions from the report Pena referred to were etched into my memory. It revealed that the cumulative safety rate of discount carriers was skewed because one of them, Southwest, had a nearly perfect safety record. Good grades for Southwest brought up the average for everybody. In contrast, ValuJet was singled out for its accident rate, 14 times as poor as that of the major carriers. So what was Pena talking about? The ValuJet crash thrust before the public the fact that an inferior airline was allowed to continue flying because of economic pressure.