Word: faa
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...Weintrob's visit apparently prompted the FAA's Atlanta office to think twice about its conclusions and conduct its own quick re-evaluation of the ValuJet safety record...
...days after [our investigators' visit], the Atlanta FAA staff wrote a memo to headquarters. For eight pages, they described accidents and poor FAA surveillance until reaching an inevitable conclusion so startling and obvious that it should have changed history--except that it was also a conclusion so threatening to ValuJet and contrary to FAA habit that the memo was immediately buried, secreted away until disaster forced it into the open...
...agitated, defensive voice, Pena said an FAA report proved that discount airlines were as safe as the major carriers. But Pena had to know this simply wasn't true. He was protecting an airline just the way government officials had for decades. In fact, the FAA had an avalanche of evidence that proved that ValuJet had been troubled for months and that other marginal airlines were just as unsafe. Conclusions from the report Pena referred to were etched into my memory. It revealed that the cumulative safety rate of discount carriers was skewed because one of them, Southwest...
...working at home on my computer when Pena took to the airwaves. As I heard his comments from the television across the room, my fingers froze over the keyboard. Was Pena ignorant of the true nature of the FAA...
...FAA administrator, David Hinson, echoed [Pena's] assurances. A former executive at Midway Airlines and McDonnell Douglas, Hinson had always seemed genuinely determined to streamline the FAA and address safety as well as commercial interests. Yet I knew he had to have seen the agency's own account of the differences among air carriers. Hinson had to realize that within a few days of the disaster, records had revealed that the crashed plane was a used DC-9, serial number 901VJ, that had been plagued with faulty equipment and emergency landings since January. Watching Transportation and FAA officials, I realized...