FAA Officials Say Workload Hurt Oversight of ValuJet

Staff cutbacks and terrorist threats left the Federal Aviation Administration so far behind in inspecting start-up airlines such as ValuJet that the agency often approved the airline’s policy manuals without scrutinizing them, FAA officials testified Thursday.

At hearings this week into ValuJet’s fatal Everglades crash, the officials said hazardous-materials inspections have declined sharply in the past three years because the agency has had to deal with a surge in terrorist threats at a time of staff cutbacks.

“We were still falling behind,” said Robert Bruce, one of the FAA’s top inspectors at ValuJet’s Atlanta headquarters. “Obviously, I can’t be on 15 flights a week. We are forced to rely on spot checks.”

The testimony drew angry responses from relatives of the victims and concern from John Goglia, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigative panel.

“I’ve spent my whole life around the FAA and what I heard today disturbs me greatly,” Goglia said.

“Your job is to protect the public’s safety in travel. If the system prevents you from doing that, we’re going to find out why,” he said.

Marilyn Chamberlin, the mother of pilot Candalyn Kubeck, said she was horrified to hear the FAA doesn’t have the authority to open packages it believes may contain hazardous materials. She noted that Agriculture Department inspectors can open any crate of fruit suspected of containing damaging pests.

“A fruit fly won’t kill anyone, but they have the right to open packages,” she said.

The hearings have focused on how improperly boxed oxygen-generating canisters wound up in the cargo hold of ValuJet Flight 592, perhaps sparking a fire that downed the plane May 11, killing all 110 people aboard.

ValuJet has blamed its maintenance contractor, SabreTech Corp., for improperly packing the canisters.

One after another Thursday, mid-level FAA managers testified how they were too overworked and understaffed to cope with start-up airlines such as ValuJet, even having to borrow staff from other departments.

Charles Spillner, the FAA’s flight standards manager for ValuJet, said he requested extra inspectors several months before the crash.

His boss rejected the idea. “He suggested that maybe I was the one who should be let go,” Spillner said.

To improve its inspections, the FAA will hire 118 new employees for its hazardous-materials program, including 110 inspectors, said Bruce Butterworth, head of FAA security operations. The agency now has about 300 inspectors.

Butterworth said the FAA also plans to crack down on undeclared hazardous materials, but noted the difficulty in detecting the cargo because each package cannot be opened and examined.

“If it doesn’t tick, doesn’t leak, doesn’t break open, doesn’t catch fire, you’ll never know it’s there,” said Butterworth.

“If a perfectly innocent [looking] box gets put in cargo, there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “You can’t open all the boxes.”

Two other airlines besides ValuJet--Delta and TWA--were also shipping oxygen generators until recently, NTSB documents show.

But TWA shipped only its own generators and had approval to do so, company spokesman John McDonald said Thursday. He said they were always discharged before being packed into approved, properly labeled containers.

Delta spokesman Bill Berry said Delta halted all canister shipments when ordered to do so by the FAA in the wake of the ValuJet crash.