Word: crashes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...would insist that bogus parts had never caused a plane to crash, and that there was no increase in the number of bogus parts, just more reports. On my desk in a light blue folder lay a computer printout that clearly indicated the NTSB did not agree. Page after dense page described accidents the NTSB tied to counterfeit parts. For instance, in 1990 a Pan Am Express flight crashed when its nose landing gear jammed "due to the installation of a bogus part by unknown persons...
Today most people think that Doppler radar wind-shear-detection systems have been installed in every airport. In fact, only 16 are installed and working. Some $350 million worth of parts for Doppler wind-shear-warning radar (promised after a horrible 1985 crash in Dallas) moldered away when truckloads of equipment went to dusty warehouses instead of to the airports most in need. Other systems are installed but haven't been switched on. Seven of the remaining 47 scheduled for production haven't even been delivered...
...years since the Dallas crash, other wind-shear accidents have cost passenger lives. Two unsolved crashes in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have been tentatively attributed to wind shear that might have been avoided with Doppler radar. After a USAir flight crashed in Charlotte, North Carolina, in July 1994, the NTSB said the delay in installing the radar had cost the lives of 37 onboard. Charlotte was supposed to get the radar system in early 1993. As an airport in the South (where wind shear is particularly common), it was No. 5 on the FAA list. But the inevitable delays...
Exhausted when I got home, I fell asleep early. It was July 17. "There's been another crash. It doesn't look good," I heard my husband say through my fog of sleep. "It crashed into the ocean." I got up and followed him to the television. TWA Flight 800 had just plummeted into the Atlantic in a ball of flames off Long Island, and it looked like hundreds of passengers were dead. A familiar, wrenching dread tugged at me. Echoes of ValuJet questions bounced around my head. Had the TWA jet crashed because an incompetent mechanic missed something? Because...
Time and again, my office uncovered practices that would shock the public: sloppy inspections of planes, perfunctory review of pilots, lax oversight of airline procedures, disregard for bogus airplane parts, sievelike security at airports, antiquated air-traffic-control systems. Only with a major crash, only with people dead and sobbing survivors filling television screens, does the FAA step up to the plate and make changes. I found the FAA's complacency toward accidents difficult to accept...