Every time a commercial airliner meets up with disaster, the flying public is forced to confront dangers it never even knew existed--remember microbursts and wind shear?--and the airlines scramble to alter policies, upgrade technology or retrain their pilots. In the case of the May 11 crash of ValuJet Flight 592, which plunged into the muck of the Everglades and killed all 110 people on board, the safety concerns are so varied--and the questions emerging about the role of the Federal Aviation Administration in regulating low-cost airlines so troubling--that it may be a while before passengers again feel that the skies are comfortable, never mind friendly.
Grudgingly, painfully, the swamp that swallowed Flight 592 is surrendering parts of the jet, as well as human remains, but it has not yielded an exact answer to what caused the crash. Investigators, wading through thick heat, razor-sharp saw grass, toxic jet fuel and the almost cartoonish threat of alligators, first speculated that the 27-year-old DC-9 was struck down by some combination of age and poor maintenance. Now they are focusing on a new culprit: the 50 to 60 oxygen generators believed to have been stowed--perhaps mistakenly--in the forward cargo hold of the aircraft. The generators, which are used on some planes to provide oxygen if the cabin undergoes sudden depressurization, can get as hot as 500 degrees F when activated; the heat, combined with the oxygen, can result in combustion.
Although ValuJet is not authorized to carry hazardous materials, the cargo manifest noted that this particular five-box shipment, destined for the company's Atlanta headquarters, was empty. In fact, there may have been a misunderstanding--what National Transportation Safety Board investigator Greg Feith has called "a terminology problem"--and possibly a fatal one: the canisters may not all have been empty; they may have merely exceeded their shelf life. Though no generators have yet been found, pieces of the salvaged wreckage, including a singed cockpit life preserver and two sooty steps from near the cockpit, indicate there was a fire on board the plane. And minutes before the crash, pilot Candalyn Kubeck told the Miami tower the cockpit was filling with smoke. Company president Lewis Jordan, a former head of Continental Airlines, has cautioned against a "rush to judgment," but told TIME late last week that to his knowledge, ValuJet was not authorized to carry the generators. Another possibility being investigated is that a short in the plane's wiring might have started the fire.