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WASHINGTON: Children's pajamas are flame-retardant ?- maybe airplanes should be too. That?s the brilliant conclusion the FAA has finally come to in the wake of the crash of Swissair flight 111. The agency, expecting new tests to show that the insulation in the bodies of almost all of the world's 12,000 passenger jets may catch fire when exposed to heat, officially recommended that the planes be retrofitted with new flame-retardant insulation...
...cost of adding the insulation would run into the billions, which may be one reason why the FAA isn't sounding an urgent alarm. It hasn?t issued an "airworthiness directive," the FAA's term for something that must be done at once. Instead, the agency suggests that the retrofit be performed at each plane?s next scheduled maintenance check, or thereabouts. The FAA has known about the potential insulation problem for years -- its Chinese counterpart reported the problem in 1996 after a Chinese Eastern MD-11 caught fire in Beijing. Hopefully, no more fresh evidence will come along...
...Swedish-born Werjefelt, 54, has failed to win over the FAA. It maintains that goggles and oxygen masks are all that flight crews need to cope with cockpit-smoke emergencies, which occur at the rate of 40 to 50 a year on U.S. domestic flights. The agency says studies show that efforts to set up and activate EVAS-like devices could distract pilots from the task of controlling their planes. Many flight crews would disagree, according to John Mazor, a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents 50,000 commercial pilots. The EVAS, he says, "really works...
...planes. After years of study, airlines still balk at installing individual smoke hoods that could provide each passenger with up to 30 min. of clean air. (Market leader Essex PB&R Corp. of Edwardsville, Ill., offers eight different versions at prices ranging from $160 to $750.) Nor has the FAA mandated hoods for passengers, although crews of commercial airlines have them. The airlines and FAA argue that smoke hoods could make it more difficult for passengers to evacuate a plane. Of course, that can also be difficult when you're blinded and choking on toxic fumes...
That's one reason some 300 of the FORTUNE 500 companies have installed smoke hoods on their corporate jets. And it's why safety-minded staff members of the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board--which investigates air crashes--regularly stow smoke hoods in carry-on luggage when they...