Word: valujet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mary Schiavo, Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, was working at her home computer on Saturday, May 11, 1996, when she received a phone call that made her feel "queasy and sick." It was the kind of nightmare she had long feared: ValuJet Flight 592 had crashed in the Florida Everglades. A fire had broken out in the cargo hold of the jet, an ancient DC-9 en route to Atlanta from Miami, filling the cabin with smoke and probably asphyxiating the 110 passengers and crew members before they were swallowed by the swamp. Schiavo was disturbed not only...
...night following the crash, Schiavo would be ignored no longer: she appeared on ABC's Nightline opposite FAA administrator David Hinson, who insisted that ValuJet was "safe to fly. I would fly it." Flatly contradicting him and alluding to the FAA's mission to promote air travel, Schiavo declared, "It's not my job to sell tickets on ValuJet." She dramatically disclosed to a national audience the FAA's own damning statistics: ValuJet's safety record was 14 times as poor as that of other discount carriers, even though the agency claimed that all airlines were equally safe. "I would...
After the crash, ValuJet was grounded for more than three months. The carrier has since returned to the air, although reduced in size. Is ValuJet safe to fly? Is any airline? Yes, if compared with other means of transportation, such as autos. But given the rapid growth of air travel, today's low accident rate will mean greater numbers of crashes in the next decade unless safety is improved. In the wake of Schiavo's campaign, Congress has changed the FAA's mandate to make safety its primary mission...
...Aviation asked me to explain why I was leaving my job. Transportation Secretary Pena and administrator Hinson were there too, and they seemed determined to distance themselves from any responsibility for the problems at the FAA that I complained about. The Inspector General had never warned him about ValuJet, Pena told the Senators. He had no knowledge, he insisted, of how deep the crisis ran at the discounter, and he found it very troubling that I had implied that alarm bells should have been ringing all over the dot for months...
...this kind of revisionist pabulum that had driven me from my job. I explained to the panel that months before, the Secretary's own chief of staff, Ann Bormolini, had at the request of her close personal friend, a ValuJet lobbyist, asked me what I was doing snooping into ValuJet. I told the Senators that in response to this unusual request, I'd written a stern memo outlining what the FAA and my office were doing about ValuJet. Did Pena expect us to believe he had no idea what his chief of staff did every day in the office suite...