Word: flighting
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...weeks after TWA Flight 800 blew up, I sat through interview after interview on television as the country tried to sort out what could have gone wrong. Yet it was difficult for me to reassure the public when I knew about the FAA's sloppy safety and security record. To be sure, many FAA field employees are hardworking civil servants who have devoted their careers to aviation. They fly all the time, and so do their families and friends. Many FAA inspectors helped my office with investigations, reports and testimony before Congress. Senior FAA officials tried to reach compromises with...
...patiently, from the small number of crashes and even smaller number of attacks on planes just did not justify vast airline investments in safety and security. After all, as the FAA's associate administrator for civil-aviation security, Cathal Flynn, would tell me, the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, cost $1 billion. Trying to prevent another Pan Am 103 would cost $5 billion over 10 years. Couldn't I understand? The numbers just didn...
Since 1982, the NTSB has urged the FAA to order airlines to install better black boxes [the flight-data recorders that can provide clues to the cause of an accident]. All the NTSB wanted was black boxes that can continue recording for fractions of a second beyond a catastrophic explosion or massive electrical failure aboard an airplane. European airlines have used such advanced black-box technology for years. That means many American planes flying to Europe have the advanced boxes. But the FAA did not want to compel airlines to install improved boxes. No, the agency declared, the new technology...
More than a year later, in the days after TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, the public, politicians, investigators and grieving family members waited tensely while scuba divers searched for clues. Eventually the recorder was found, its body remarkably undamaged. But it played back only a millisecond of a mysterious loud noise. The box was one of the old models, and didn't have the extra capacity to record in the midst of a catastrophe like the one on TWA Flight...
...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...