ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 16, 1996 TAG: 9611180059
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The New York Times
The Transportation Department has decided to seek new rules requiring fire safety equipment in all airline cargo compartments, officials said before hearings into the May crash of a ValuJet DC-9 that crash investigators believe could have been prevented by such equipment.
The National Transportation Safety Board had long sought such equipment, including heat sensors, smoke detectors and fire extinguishing systems, but had been turned down by the Federal Aviation Administration, which considered the benefit too low to justify the cost.
Top regulators from the Transportation Department are scheduled to be cross-examined on that subject in safety board hearings that will begin Monday in Miami into the crash, which occurred in the Everglades on May 11 and killed all 110 people on board.
The crash apparently was caused by a fire; both the heat and the oxygen for the fire were supplied by aircraft parts from another plane that were being shipped as cargo. The parts, called oxygen generators, are used to make oxygen for emergency masks through a chemical reaction that also creates much heat.
Alan Roberts, the associate administrator for hazardous materials safety, and Lynne Osmus, the FAA chief of staff, are among about 20 witnesses who are expected to testify, along with a representative of the company that made the oxygen generators.
For years pilots and the safety board have urged stronger fire-safety measures, but the FAA and the airlines have resisted. Another expert scheduled to testify next week, Robert Massi, vice chairman of the accident survival committee with the Air Line Pilots Association, said that in rating how serious a hazard was to an airplane in flight, ``fire is right up there with a wing falling off.''
The FAA, which is part of the Transportation Department, said it would propose fire detection and suppression systems for 2,800 older commercial aircraft that do not have them now. Those systems are common on wide-body jets but less common on narrow-bodies, like the DC-9. Cargo compartments, like the one on the DC-9 that crashed, are airtight and heavily insulated. They were designed so that in a fire, the combustion would use up all the oxygen before burning through. But in the ValuJet case, the oxygen generators apparently provided more oxygen.
The FAA also said it would move to ban certain materials that burn easily from cargo.
That would reduce some risks, but ValuJet had taken what it thought was a stronger precaution: It had decided never to carry hazardous materials. On the flight that crashed, though, the airline did not recognize what it was carrying, a problem that the hearings are expected to explore. Another question is whether the pilots could have landed the plane safely if they had been alerted by instruments as the fire began, instead of by screams from the passenger cabin as it raged out of control.
Two weeks after the ValuJet crash, the Research and Special Programs Administration of the Transportation Department, which sets standards for the transport of hazardous materials, issued a temporary ban on transporting the oxygen generators by air as cargo.
But on-board fires continue to be a problem. On Sept. 5, a Federal Express DC-10 on a flight from Boston landed in flames at Stewart International Airport near Newburgh, N.Y., and was then gutted by fire. The five people on board escaped.
In 1988, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended to the FAA that it require smoke- and fire-detection systems and extinguishing systems. That followed a fire on Feb. 3, 1988, in the cargo compartment of an American Airlines DC-9 flying from Dallas to Nashville. On that flight, the captain was aware of a mechanical problem on a previous flight that had let fumes into the cabin, and, skeptical that there really was a fire, decided not to declare an emergency. But the flight attendants, aware that the floor was becoming hot and soft, started moving passengers out of that part of the cabin.
Massi, the chairman of the union committee on fires, said training should be changed to make pilots more aware of the hazard and less fearful of making an emergency landing and discovering later that the problem was only ``a roast beef burning in the back of the plane.''
Some airlines train crews for on-board fires using flight simulators, but Massi said those usually ended with a successful - if only simulated - landing, which could lull pilots into complacency about the risk. ``Simulators should be more realistic in that it will not always come out the best way,'' he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB