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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...
...more than five years as Inspector General, Schiavo spent a lot of time refuting the FAA. Although her TV revelation seemed like the first act of a whistle blower, it was in fact the denouement of a personal crusade to make the agency more responsive to safety issues--and less responsive to the needs of the airlines. Stifled continually by the FAA's political prowess, Schiavo eventually decided that the best way to bring about reform at the agency was to resign and tell her story. In the following excerpts from her new book, Flying Blind, Flying Safe, she describes...
...bible may teach that human life is priceless, but in my early years as Inspector General, I heard rumors that a Federal Aviation Administration study assigned a worth to the average passenger who might die in a plane crash. In its cost-benefit analysis, the rumor went, the FAA easily determined that the value of those lives didn't amount to much compared with the hard, cold billions that saving them would cost in aircraft-safety devices, in beefed-up monitoring of planes, pilots and air traffic, and in airports hermetically sealed against bombs and hijacking...
...meeting after our investigations began, FAA officials insisted that there was no epidemic of bogus parts. "We have to consider the economic impact to industry," they said, an explanation that echoed through my years as Inspector General. I truly believed a line I started using around the office--"If it's on a plane, it could be bogus." We carted boxes of sample bogus parts around with us, laid them out on tables and urged the airline maintenance people to take a good look. We needed them, we said, to hold on to any similar bogus parts they found. Call...
...week later, the House Subcommittee on 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...