Word: crashes
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After the crash, ValuJet was grounded for more than three months. The carrier has since returned to the air, although reduced in size. Is ValuJet safe to fly? Is any airline? Yes, if compared with other means of transportation, such as autos. But given the rapid growth of air travel, today's low accident rate will mean greater numbers of crashes in the next decade unless safety is improved. In the wake of Schiavo's campaign, Congress has changed the FAA's mandate to make safety its primary mission...
...bible may teach that human life is priceless, but in my early years as Inspector General, I heard rumors that a Federal Aviation Administration study assigned a worth to the average passenger who might die in a plane crash. In its cost-benefit analysis, the rumor went, the FAA easily determined that the value of those lives didn't amount to much compared with the hard, cold billions that saving them would cost in aircraft-safety devices, in beefed-up monitoring of planes, pilots and air traffic, and in airports hermetically sealed against bombs and hijacking...
...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...