Word: planes
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...looked like hundreds of passengers were dead. A familiar, wrenching dread tugged at me. Echoes of ValuJet questions bounced around my head. Had the TWA jet crashed because an incompetent mechanic missed something? Because a bogus part sold to the airline by shady dealers had failed? Or was the plane blown out of the sky because lax security had permitted a bomb to be hidden on the plane or slipped aboard as luggage or cargo...
...people died when an Avions de Transport regional plane, flown by American Eagle, crashed into a soybean field in Roselawn, Indiana. A design flaw made the French-Italian plane become violently uncontrollable in cold weather. Pilots and aeronautical engineers knew what the problem was: the de-icing boots on the ATR wings were not big enough. Those are the rubber sleeves on each wing that can be expanded to crack sheets of ice. But the FAA determined that lengthening the boot would cost too much money. It took three plane crashes, the third one scattering human remains and debris over...
...also took a fatal plane crash for the FAA to heed years of evidence showing that the distance between planes landing at an airport should be increased. For years, the National Transportation Safety Board [the independent agency that investigates plane accidents] told the FAA to increase the distance between jets. The board studied 51 accidents caused by wake turbulence from 1983 to 1993. Twenty-seven people had been killed, and 40 planes had been damaged or destroyed. In those years, the NTSB repeatedly asked the FAA to set new rules, but the FAA refused. It would be three years more...
...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...
...reply stunned him. Confused, the FAA inspectors asked, What spate? The inspectors admitted they didn't know how many accidents there had been. Taken aback, Weintrob and his team laid out details: In its short life, Valujet had had more than its share of accidents and mishaps. Its planes repeatedly overshot runways and suffered from collapsed landing gears. Planes took off in weather that kept pilots of other airlines on the ground. Fires broke out on planes. Engines exploded. In one blast, the engine spewed shrapnel into the fuselage of a plane, piercing the metal and injuring seven people inside...