Introduction: The ValuJet Everglades Crash

On May 11, 1996, a ValuJet plane crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing all 105 passengers, both pilots, and three flight attendants. Televised reports of the crash scene were interspersed with interviews of high-level government officials assuring the American public that the crash was an isolated incident and ValuJet was not to be blamed. "I have flown ValuJet. ValuJet is a safe airline, as is our entire aviation system," said Secretary of Transportation Frederico Pena. One of the Federal Aviation Administration's top officials, Anthony Broderick, told reporters, ". . . if ValuJet was unsafe, we would have grounded it." Broderick's boss, the head of the FAA, David Hinson, echoed his subordinate's words: "The airline [ValuJet] is safe to fly. I would fly it."

The American public loved ValuJet, a wildly successful, no-frills airline that routinely offered fares between thirty-one cities for less than the cost of taking a train or bus. But the families of the victims of Flight 592 had no idea that the same government officials who were now telling them ValuJet was safe had privately concluded, three months before the crash, that "ValuJet is not meeting its duty to provide service with the highest possible degree of safety." And the victims, whose remains were now submerged in the muck of an Everglades swamp, had had no way of knowing that the plane they had boarded in Miami, a twenty-seven-year old DC-9-32, serial number 901VJ, had been called back to its Atlanta base for maintenance problems at least four times. Perhaps a couple of the victims had read the Business Week magazine article in which ValuJet's chief operating officer, Lawrence Priddy, had articulated his company's goal: "Every other start-up wants to be another United or Delta or American. We just want to get rich."

ValuJet's safety problems were not limited to a single, geriatric DC-9. The airline had a rap sheet a mile long. An engine had exploded on one plane as it had rolled toward takeoff, ejecting shrapnel into the fuselage and injuring seven people inside, including a flight attendant who was permanently disfigured in the fire. ValuJet pilots, among the most poorly paid and least experienced in the industry, routinely flew in weather that grounded other carriers. Their compensation plan paid them only for flights completed, a disincentive to play it safe and stay out of the sky. The inexperienced pilots were infamous for overrunning runways--in the winter of 1995 ValuJet planes overshot runways at Washington's Dulles International Airport, in Atlanta, and in Savannah. Passengers on two ValuJet flights landing in Nashville had scares: one plane came down with a hard landing, and another experienced a nose-gear collapse. While ValuJet pilots may not have been skilled at routine landings, they certainly had plenty of experience touching down in emergency situations: in 1994 the airline made fifteen emergency landings, and in 1995 it made fifty-seven. Just five months into 1996 the company had broken its own record--fifty-nine emergency landings, almost one every other day.

Although American travelers had little way of knowing ValuJet's disturbing safety record, government regulators were well aware that something was amiss. In 1995 the U.S. Department of Defense investigated ValuJet when the airline had bid on a contract to fly the agency's personnel. After interviewing the company's pilots, mechanics, and managers and scrutinizing the airline's books, the Pentagon concluded, "The company does not yet meet the DOD Commercial Air Carrier Quality and Safety Requirements." ValuJet could not be trusted to transport government personnel safely. The Defense Department's report was kept secret. While Defense Department employees were kept off ValuJet planes, the public continued to board.

The FAA, the Department of Transportation agency charged with overseeing airline safety, had plenty of hints that ValuJet's maintenance was shoddy. Its February 1996 investigation revealed that ValuJet had allowed one of its fleet to make eight flights with a hole in its engine housing, that on another plane an emergency chute had inflated inside the cabin, pinning a flight attendant to a wall, that on one flight a cabin lost pressure mid-flight, that mechanics mended planes with duct tape, and that crews on one plane had lodged thirty-one complaints about a broken weather radar system before it had been fixed. Nine days before the Everglades crash, FAA administrators prepared another report, this time in response to a request made by Transportation Secretary Pe-a. This report, too, painted a grim picture of ValuJet's safety record: the airline's accident rate was more than four times that of other low-cost carriers and more than ten times higher than the major airlines. Government officials kept this report under wraps, too, until after the Everglades crash.

One public servant tried to raise her voice above the din of ValuJet's government allies. Department of Transportation inspector general Mary Schiavo and her staff had been investigating ValuJet for years, and she, too, was well aware of the airline's safety record. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, Schiavo was one of the government's fifty-six inspectors general, whose job it was to investigate abuse within government regulatory agencies, audit contracts and agency financial statements, and make sure government programs were carried out effectively. A pilot, a Harvard graduate, a lawyer and former White House fellow, Schiavo had done stints as a special assistant to the U.S. attorney general and as assistant secretary of labor under Elizabeth Dole. She had been raising red flags over ValuJet's maintenance and repair operations for months before the crash. She was most concerned about one of ValuJet's unorthodox and, in her opinion, unsafe cost-cutting measures--the airline had outsourced its maintenance and repair functions to fifty independent contractors, over which ValuJet had little control. Schiavo warned that there simply were not enough checks in ValuJet's operations system to ensure that the airline's aged fleet was being adequately serviced.

During the course of the inspector general's ValuJet investigation, one plane in particular emerged as being problematic, a twenty-seven-year-old DC-9-32, serial number 901VJ. Between January and February 1996 the plane had been involved in a series of incidents, notably, "a malfunctioning fuel anti-ice valve, faulty gears, a loose oil cap causing a drop in oil pressure, smoke and fumes seeping into the cabin during taxiing, loss of pressure during an emergency landing, landing gear that wouldn't retract after takeoff, broken piston rods, [and] leaking tail seals." Schiavo urged FAA regulators to take action against the airline. They were uninterested in doing so.

By the winter of 1996 rumors about ValuJet's maintenance troubles were starting to circulate outside of the Department of Transportation, and a handful of reporters were asking FAA regulators tough questions about the airline. Government officials admitted ValuJet had been under their scrutiny yet insisted they had found no "significant safety concerns." Secretary Pe-a decided to assuage the simmering public concern by canceling his Delta Airlines reservation from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., and booking himself on a ValuJet flight. Now he could claim that he had flown the airline.

While the inspector general had allowed herself to be muzzled before the ValuJet crash, after the tragedy there was no holding her back. On millions of TVs across the nation, Schiavo said in no uncertain terms that she would not fly ValuJet. Writing an article for Newsweek magazine titled "I Don't Like to Fly," the former pilot confessed that what she had learned as inspector general now kept her off of commuter and "marginal" airlines. In response, regulators and members of Congress ratcheted up their pro-ValuJet pitch, sounding more like the public relations arm of the airline industry than like public servants. ValuJet was a completely safe airline, Pe-a told the American people, and in some cases it even "exceeded federal standards on safety." National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) vice chairman Robert Francis offered that both he and his daughter flew ValuJet. FAA administrator Hinson said he was "troubled" that Schiavo would think an airline was unsafe. Former FAA chief counsel Kenneth Quinn accused the inspector general of "unjustly scaring the traveling public," adding that she was "a very articulate, combative and aggressive public servant." Senator Ted Stevens (R.-AK; $221,100) announced in a Commerce Committee hearing that Schiavo was "destroying confidence" in air safety. He then reminded his Senate colleagues that President Clinton had the right to fire her.

It is likely that the government never would have taken action against ValuJet, even after the crash, had an anonymous FAA employee not secretly informed Schiavo about a memo the agency's Atlanta field staff had written to their superiors in Washington, three months before the accident. Gravely concerned about "the quality of maintenance inspections performed" on ValuJet planes, the staff inspectors had urged FAA officials to ground the airline. The memo had been ignored.

When Schiavo asked FAA officials to see the document after the crash, they denied it existed. A few days later it was in her hands, but only after she had issued a subpoena to get it. This was the smoking gun that finally prompted regulators to do what they should have done before 105 people had lost their lives. On June 17, five weeks after the crash, Hinson announced a "voluntary cessation" of ValuJet's operations. The airline had been grounded.

Now that the public's interest had been captured, Congress jumped into the ValuJet fray. Hearings were scheduled, and Congress's investigative arm, the General Accounting Office (GAO), was ordered to look into the situation. Previously somnolent senators, even those who had earlier cheered ValuJet's unprecedented market success, now pounded their chests and called for something to be done. Appearing at one of these hearings, Hinson did not sound like the same man who had, less than a month earlier, jumped to ValuJet's defense. He told Congress, "It is apparent now that the extraordinarily rapid growth of [ValuJet] created problems that should have been more clearly recognized and dealt with sooner and more aggressively."1 What Hinson failed to explain was why he had sat on so much information, refusing to act, in the months preceding the crash. Pe-a, too, had a quick change of heart, confessing to the public that ValuJet had forced the FAA to take a long, hard look in the mirror and make significant management and organizational changes. Yet, he failed to address why the FAA had largely ignored the ten reports written by his own Office of Inspector General since 1992, all of them critical, detailing the many lapses in FAA oversight of aircraft operations, parts manufacturers, repair stations, and airline mechanics.

Fed up with the FAA's inaction, Mary Schiavo resigned as inspector general in July 1996. But it was an airport security issue, not the ValuJet travesty, that led her ultimately to conclude, "I couldn't continue working at a place where all we did was sit around, waiting for people to die."

A few weeks after the ValuJet crash Schiavo was scheduled to present the results of her office's multiple-year study of airport security to Hinson, Pe-a, and high-level FAA staff. Among Schiavo's findings: Plainclothes agents had been able to wander, unchallenged, through supposedly secure areas, including airfields, aircraft parking spaces, baggage processing centers, and maintenance areas. At the nation's largest, highest-risk airports, agents had been whisked through X-ray machines and security screening points carrying guns, knives, fake bombs, and, in one case, a (deactivated) hand grenade. The U.S. aviation security system, the inspector general had concluded, was a sieve.

Apprehensive about the meeting, Schiavo knew that many in her audience would not welcome what she had to say. But again she was shocked by the lengths to which FAA officials--and the secretary of transportation--would go to keep the aviation system running, at the risk of the public's safety.

The U.S. Olympic Games were scheduled to open shortly, and the FAA and Department of Transportation did not want the public to be privy to any information that would keep people from flying to Atlanta. Their solution was to classify the damning document issued by Schiavo's staff. That the inspector general had already cleared her report with government classifiers before the meeting did not seem to matter those who now wanted to bury it. "They didn't really care that the airport security report wouldn't qualify for classification," Schiavo later wrote in her book, Flying Blind, Flying Safe. "It would take weeks to figure that out, and by then the Olympics would be over, the goal accomplished, the crisis past."

Two weeks after Schiavo resigned from her job, TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean shortly following takeoff from New York's Kennedy International Airport, killing all 239 people on board. After the ValuJet crash Schiavo had known immediately that the cause had been some sort of mechanical failure. But this time she was stumped. Shoddy maintenance and sloppy airport security were equally plausible explanations.