Word: valujet
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...next day deputy assistant inspector general Larry Weintrob and two other officials from my office walked into the Atlanta office of the FAA. There was only one major question: What is the FAA doing about ValuJet? Weintrob pressed for details about the recent spate of accidents. The 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...
Some individual ValuJet planes had chronic problems. It would not have been difficult for inspectors [in the Atlanta FAA office] to go over ValuJet records and trace these persistent breakdowns. Instead, the Atlanta inspectors seemed unimpressed with the summary [of problems compiled by Weintrob]. The number of accidents and incidents was not "disproportionate," they said. There was no common link between them. The FAA had no special plans for ValuJet...
...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...
That disaster came three months later, on May 11, when ValuJet Flight 592 plunged into the Everglades...