By Eliot Kleinberg
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

In August, Jared Lathem got married in Venezuela, in a building dedicated to the memory of his brother.

Ray Lathem was a minister in training, returning from Venezuela, when he boarded an Atlanta-bound plane in Miami on May 11, 1996.

Moments later, ValuJet Flight 592, a fire blazing in its hold, nose-dived into the Everglades, killing 110 passengers and crew.

It remains the deadliest plane crash in Florida history.

Investigators quickly determined the direct cause.

But there was a larger conclusion that the people died because they selected an airline offering lower prices by cutting corners in an industry that, since deregulation, had made that the norm.

ValuJet contracted out critical aspects such as cargo.

The outside company's employees saw volatile chemical oxygen generators, yanked out of another plane because they had passed their expiration date, and presumed they were empty. That's what they marked on the manifest.

The canisters were loaded onto Flight 592. Moments after takeoff, investigators believe, the canisters activated in the cargo, sparking or feeding a horrific fire that brought down the plane.

The National Transportation Safety Board ruled that the crash reflected failures "up and down the line" — complacency, rushing and a bottom-line mentality in the airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration. It made no fewer than 33 recommendations; the FAA adopted 29.

Since then, accidental air deaths have dropped dramatically. But critics say too many airlines, especially with fuel and other costs continuing to rise, still focus more on revenue than safety, and the government is stretched too thin to keep them honest.

All the Rev. Warren Lathem knows is this: He lost his son.

"If the whole airline industry is completely transformed, that would in no way make up the loss," Lathem said from northern Georgia. "It has not. But if it did in every way, that certainly would not make it worthwhile."

In the ensuing decade, the numbers say the skies are safer. In 1996, ValuJet 592 crashed in Florida and TWA 800 dropped into the ocean near New York, killing 230. Those contributed to a figure that year of 0.061 accidental deaths per 100,000 commercial departures, highest in two decades. That dropped to 0.039 in 1997. Since then, it has averaged 0.019. No one died in 2002. In proportion to the volume of air traffic, the past three years have been the safest ever, the FAA says.

"We overhauled our entire oversight system for the U.S. airline industry. The safety record that's been achieved over the last several years speaks for itself," FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette said.

Mark Rosenker, acting chairman of the NTSB, credits not the dark day in May 1996 when ValuJet went down, but rather an even darker day in September 2001.

"You take a great deal of science and analysis, but you unfortunately never know what you don't know until you learn it," Rosenker said. "Compared to anything else you'd put yourself in, this is the safest mode of transportation that could be invented. (But) our ultimate goal is zero. Zero accidents. And we get closer every year."

A Chalk's Airways crash off Miami Beach in December killed 20 of the 22 who died in all of 2005. An Air France jet went off a Toronto runway in August and burned to ash, but only after all 309 aboard got out. Seven weeks later, a JetBlue flight dumped fuel as passengers watched themselves on CNN from their seats, then landed in Los Angeles on a sideways-turned front tire; no one was hurt.

The drop in fatalities seems to fly in the face of trends that both preceded and followed ValuJet 592 and that logic suggests would hurt safety, including early retirement of veteran pilots and layoffs of experienced mechanics in favor of outsourcing.

The U.S. Transportation Department said in a May 2005 report that more than half of U.S. airline maintenance is now done by non-airline workers, compared with a third in 1990. The FAA disputed the findings of its own parent agency, arguing a flawed process. It claims the figure rose from about 29 percent to 31 percent.

The outsourcing extends beyond U.S. borders: Delta Air Lines contracts in Vancouver, British Columbia; America West in El Salvador; Northwest and Continental in Hong Kong and Singapore; and United in China.

The airlines, and the companies that service them, insist safety has not been compromised. They say older planes are being retired in favor of models with lower maintenance needs and better diagnostics. Also, the airlines sometimes send components not to maintenance firms but to the manufacturers.

Unions say there aren't enough maintenance workers and government inspectors. But the FAA's Duquette said the agency now follows airlines' track records, identifies areas of vulnerability and focuses on those. Add improvements in technology and inspectors are now more productive and efficient, Duquette said.

She said the FAA also ratchets up scrutiny on financially troubled airlines to make sure they aren't cutting safety in a desperate bid to cut costs.

Marshall Filler, managing director of the Aeronautical Repair Station Association, a maintenance trade group, insists the contractors are as safe overseas as they would be here. Filler said 650 stations overseas are licensed by the FAA and twice as many U.S. companies are licensed by the aviation agency's European counterpart. Agencies have agreements to keep a close watch on everyone.

There's also public pressure because of the Internet, said Todd Curtis, president of the Seattle-based air safety advocacy group AirSafe. He said every incident now runs through the wringer of public discourse by news outlets, industry watchdogs and safety advocacy groups.

"Everyone from the lay public to the expert has access to the data, the accident reports, the analyses," he said.

As obvious as were the flaws revealed by the ValuJet crash, it still took the FAA two years to require smoke detectors and fire suppression systems in all U.S. commercial aircraft, and three years for the industry to install them in 3,500 planes, at a cost of $300 million.

"I don't think they would have done anything if they hadn't been pushed by family members," said Gale Dunham, president of the National Air Disaster Alliance, whose former husband died at the controls of a United flight in 1991 in Colorado Springs, Colo.

But Lathem, who lost his son on ValuJet 592, said: "Beyond that, I'm not sure much was learned. There was a criminal prosecution and some people were convicted of a crime. But they were low-level people, and the prosecution was not able to push the charges up to the higher levels where the fundamental decisions were made.

"FAA will recommend changes after the accumulation of so many tombstones, but they're always too late and they're always short of what needs to be done because of the relationship between the FAA and the airline industry."

Lathem added with a sigh: "I don't know the solution. It's a bigger problem than I am capable of addressing. I need to fix a flat tire today. That's about as much as I can handle."

Source: PalmBeachPost.com