Word: valujet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...billed as a dry, fact-finding inquiry. But testimony from last week's National Transportation Safety Board hearings on the May 11 ValuJet crash that took 110 lives left victims' relatives in tears as they listened to a sickening account of an avoidable tragedy...
Witnesses portrayed the crash as a horrific consequence of a chain of irresponsibility shared by ValuJet, SabreTech (one of the airline's maintenance companies) and ultimately the Federal Aviation Administration. Volatile oxygen-generating canisters were incorrectly marked empty, packed in cardboard boxes that lacked hazardous-warning labels, and stowed in the cargo hold of the DC-9 without required safety caps designed to prevent discharges that could start a fire...
...ValuJet maintenance chief David Gentry said his company accepted blame, but he insisted that it was SabreTech's job to equip the canisters with safety caps and pack the shipment properly. Failure to prevent this incompetence was laid to inspectors for the FAA, who complained that overwork and understaffing had made it tough to oversee the fast-growing ValuJet. Yet an FAA manager said he called for a review of ValuJet's authorization to fly three months before Flight 592 plunged into the Everglades shortly after taking off from Miami. The manager, John Tutora, said his report was ignored...
Experts say more improvements in vigilance are both needed and likely. "The public is being heard," observes flight-safety expert Jerome Lederer. "A sea change in attitude is coming." ValuJet resumed flying on Sept. 30 after being grounded for 15 weeks in the wake of the crash...
With travelers already leery following the crashes of TWA Flight 800 and a ValuJet plane, the FAA has gone out of its way to show its safety-mindedness. The latest step: last week the agency ordered emergency inspections of Boeing's venerable 737 jets. Reason: tests detected that rudder power control units (PCUS) might jam when extremely hot hydraulic fluid reaches a very cold "slide" (it's like a valve), although such a jam has never been reported in some 69 million flights of 737s worldwide. The rudder affects a jet's orientation. Each of the 2,700 737s...