Safety Official Assails Inadequate FAA Oversight of ValuJet Before Crash

A top federal safety official Thursday blasted the Federal Aviation Administration’s apparent failure to provide resources needed to monitor troubled ValuJet airlines in the months before last May’s disastrous Everglades crash.

John Goglia, head of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation of the accident that killed all 110 aboard a DC-9 jetliner, focused his attention on the testimony of three top FAA officials who watched over ValuJet.

David Harper, the FAA’s principal inspector of maintenance work done on ValuJet planes, admitted Thursday that “we simply needed to do more” in the months before the crash.

Robert E. Bruce, the FAA’s top overseer of ValuJet operations, testified that because of the workload in his short-handed office, he had to take work home almost every night.

Charles Spillner, manager of the FAA’s Flight Standards District office in Atlanta and boss of Harper and Bruce, said that when he asked for help, he was told by superiors to get the job done with the personnel he had or they would find someone who would.

Goglia reacted angrily to the testimony, saying that “what we heard here today has caused us all a great deal of concern. . . . Any principal operations inspector that is required to take home what I believe you said was volumes of work every night to get your job done, something is wrong,” the NTSB official told Bruce.

“You are not fulfilling your job of protecting the public interest if you work so hard and have to focus so narrowly that you cannot see the forest because you are buried in the trees,” he said.

Goglia told Bruce he was not personally to blame, but “we rely on you to make sure that when we get on a plane, it’s a safe product to fly on. . . . If the job isn’t getting done because of [a lack of] resources, we will ferret that out,” Goglia said. “If the system prevents you from doing that job, we are going to find out why, and we are going to fix it.”

The NTSB said a cargo hold fire blamed for the crash apparently was started by oxygen generators being carried as freight. Investigators said the generators were mislabeled as nonhazardous, lacked caps that could have prevented their ignition and were loaded on the plane in violation of FAA regulations.

SabreTech, a subcontractor that did maintenance work for ValuJet, has admitted mislabeling the generators and failing to install the caps.

ValuJet has acknowledged ultimate responsibility for work done by subcontractors, and the FAA has acknowledged responsibility for overseeing that work.

Asked about those FAA responsibilities, Harper said Thursday that his office had forwarded, through Spillner, a request for additional personnel to get the job done.

“The growth of that carrier was breathtaking,” Harper said. “It appeared to me that they were heading toward a problem.”

Three months before the crash, Bruce had written a letter to ValuJet Board Chairman Lewis Jordan expressing concerns that the airline was “not meeting its duty to provide service with the highest possible degree of safety” and suggesting that the airline had an “organizational culture” that conflicted with that duty.

Bruce cited four landing mishaps in late 1995 and early 1996. He said that pressures to meet flying schedules may have “affected the ability of aircraft captains to make safety-oriented decisions.”