Word: crash
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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...
...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...
...determined to streamline the FAA and address safety as well as commercial interests. Yet I knew he had to have seen the agency's own account of the differences among air carriers. Hinson had to realize that within a few days of the disaster, records had revealed that the crashed plane was a used DC-9, serial number 901VJ, that had been plagued with faulty equipment and emergency landings since January. Watching Transportation and FAA officials, I realized there was no charitable way to characterize what they were doing--they were simply lying to the public about ValuJet's record...
...officials very likely would have continued with their charade if not for a phone call to my home late in the week after the ValuJet crash. An anonymous FAA employee had tracked me down through a reporter. I needed to know, the voice said nervously, that in the days after Weintrob grilled the Atlanta inspectors about ValuJet, the Atlanta staff took a good look at the airline. Ten days later, they put their fears in writing to headquarters. Did I understand? the caller demanded. The field staff in Atlanta had recommended in February that ValuJet be grounded. They...
...memo from the field, written three months before the May 11 crash, proved highly embarrassing to the FAA and helped force the agency to re-evaluate its self-assured contention that ValuJet was a "safe airline...