Word: crashes
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...