Word: faa
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...they are, and the danger is growing. In one meeting I attended, the FAA said that shortly after the turn of the 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...
Stunned, I wanted to study the data. (At the close of the meeting, FAA officials collected all of the documents they'd shown us at the session.) Where had the figures come from, how had they been interpreted and substantiated, and what were the airlines planning to do about it? More important, what did the FAA plan to do to prevent all these crashes...
...asked the FAA to send me the graphs and any supporting research. The reply was swift: no such data existed, I was told. No charts or graphs like that here, the FAA said. In fact, no such research had been done, no such conclusions reached. But I'd seen them, I argued; I'd held them in my hands! That didn't matter; suddenly none of the officials knew what I was talking about...
Over the next years, I learned firsthand that, sadly, withholding information was routine for the FAA. Fortunately, the Boeing Co. made similar statistics public in a study that said, "If, as we expect, air traffic is to double in the 1990s, we need to reduce by half our accident rate just to hold...
...would take the deaths of more than a hundred people aboard a ValuJet plane that burst into flames, smashed into the Florida Everglades and sank in a murky swamp to expose chronic weaknesses in the FAA. The 110 souls on that flight probably never knew what caused the fire that took their lives. At first, government investigators could not pinpoint the 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...