Death to ValuJet

On May 11, 1996, ValuJet Airlines flight 592 bound for Atlanta
crashed in the Florida Everglades. It was an in-flight fire that claimed the
lives of all 110 people, including the captain, Candi Kubeck and all crew
aboard. It ruined Mothers’ Day, as all passengers were probably going
somewhere for Mothers’ Day.

It all started at 1:00 P.M. at Miami International Airport in Miami,

Florida. 105 passengers, including San Diego Chargers star running back
Rodney Culver, 3 flight attendants, first officer Richard Hazen and captain
Candalyn “Candi” Kubeck boarded a McDonnell-Douglas DC-9 plane, tail
number N904VJ, first flown in 1969 by Delta Air Lines. After a delay of one
hour and three minutes due to unexpected maintenance of the right auxiliary
hydraulic circuit pump circuit breaker, a problem that occurred on ValuJet
flight 591, the previous flight before flight 592 that had just arrived, it
finally took off at 2:03 P.M. and had a normal climb. Everything seemed
routine. But it turned out to be anything but.

When the ground crew was loading luggage, a SabreTech employee

illegally put out of date oxygen generators that supply oxygen to the oxygen
masks on a plane in the cargo hold, marked “COMAT”, which stands for
Company Owned Material. SabreTech was moving these canisters to Atlanta
for disposal. For some reason, a generator accidentally started up, during the
jolt of it being thrown into the cargo hold.

When SabreTech employees were preparing the generators for

shipping, according to the National Transportation Safety Board report, an
employee was finishing the job of another employee from the other shift. He
didn’t know what had been done to the generators in preparation for
shipment, so he just put duct tape around them and then stacked the
generators in boxes separated by a single layer of bubble wrap.

Normally, there would have been no air in the cargo hold. This was so
fires could not start. If a fire managed to start, it would simply burn itself out
due to lack of oxygen.

As the surface of the generator got hotter and hotter, they started to
ignite the cardboard boxes that the oxygen canisters were in. With suitcases,
landing gear, oxygen, and cardboard to help keep the fire burning, the fire
kept going. After the inferno completely consumed the cargo hold, it started
to eat away at the cabin floor.

The plane’s first officer Richard Hazen saw a battery problem in the
cockpit. Moments later, there was a sudden jolt. This worried Hazen and
Kubeck. They were losing all control and electricity. A flight attendant
smelled smoke, and she informed Kubeck that there could potentially be a
fire in the cabin. ValuJet’s flight attendant manual said not to open the
cockpit door if there is smoke or other poisonous gases in the cabin. Because
the intercom to the cockpit was off, there was no other way for the crew to
inform the captain of what was happening in the cabin.

At 2:08 P.M., Kubeck told Air Traffic Control that they were returning
to Miami. She did not want to drop the oxygen masks, because air would
rush in and make the problem worse. Most everyone was choking on the
toxic fumes at this point, and laboratory tests showed that there could have
been survivors if she did. Since the plane crashed in a swamp, if they could
swim, they could have swam to the shore of the swamp and possibly
survived.

At this point, the cockpit was next on the fire’s menu. At 2:09 P.M., a
flight attendant can be heard shouting “Fire, fire, fire, fire!” into the
cockpit’s voice recorder. There were also people screaming in the
background.

At 2:10 P.M., Kubeck said the final words audible on the recorder:

“We are on fire! We are completely on fire!”

At 2:11 P.M., flight 592 disappeared from the radar. This is when it is
believed that it went down in a swamp in the Florida Everglades at a wildlife
preserve. When it went down, the plane’s interior was completely on fire. It
is believed that everyone on the plane became unconscious from the smoke.
With no one in control of the plane, it crashed and shattered on impact.

Immediately, searchers covered the area, hoping for survivors. The

park rangers built a gravel path to protect the searchers. It is still there today.
In their search for survivors, however, they were out of luck. Sawgrass,
alligators, and risk of bacterial infection from cuts harassed the searchers.
Also, the nearest road was over a quarter of a mile away from the crash site
at a wildlife preservation center. Later, divers found the shattered and
charred remains of the plane, a few bodies, but most importantly, the black
box and the cockpit voice recorder.

When the victims’ families arrived at the site, the rangers gave them
the worst news they had ever received. They told them there was nothing
more they could possibly do except stand there for a few minutes and say
goodbye.

A witness, a fisherman fishing in the swamp, saw the plane crash.

This is his actual account:

“I saw the plane flying very low and then it curved sharply. There was
no smoke or flames. The landing gear was up. I thought it was just an
aircraft that was doing something stupid. When it went down, I couldn’t see
anything like debris. I mean, you could smell the jet fuel, but it sounded like
nothing had happened.”

The FAA cracked down on ValuJet. This wasn’t ValuJet’s first go-
around with hazardous materials on their planes.

A few months later, the FAA allowed it to resume flying, but under
probation. ValuJet was already being investigated for a similar accident a
year earlier. They could not buy more planes or add more cities to their
service locations without FAA permission. When ValuJet took off again, it
had 9 jets, versus 52 before the crash. According to an archive of ValuJet’s
website, they had pulled service to and from Miami. They were freed from
probation in September 1996, but no one would fly ValuJet due to poor
safety reputations.

Flight 592 was ValuJet’s 6th accident. It was the first with at least one
fatality. They had had more accidents than any other major airline at the
time. Because nobody would fly ValuJet anymore, out of fear of a repeat of
flight 592, ValuJet merged with AirTran Airways, a new airline and took the
AirTran name. Because of fear of people not flying AirTran again, they
mention almost nothing of their past as ValuJet. After the merger, AirTran
has had a total of three accidents with one serious injury and no fatalities.

Just because they merged with AirTran didn’t mean that they were out
of trouble with the law. A Florida grand jury indicted ValuJet on 110 counts
of 3rd degree murder, 110 counts of manslaughter and 110 counts of
negligent homicide; one count for every person who died on flight 592.
When the case went to trial, ValuJet was found not guilty. This enraged the
families of the victims of flight 592.

Instead, they brought SabreTech to trial. SabreTech was ValuJet’s

contracting company, whose employees loaded cargo into the cargo holds of
ValuJet’s planes. SabreTech originally was found guilty, because they
illegally attempted to return the canisters to Atlanta, rather than properly
disposed of in Miami or St. Louis, their headquarters. It was illegal at the
time to put hazardous materials on a plane.

But part of the verdict was thrown out by the United States 11th Circuit
Court. SabreTech settled the case out of court, agreeing to pay a $500,000
fine and to donate $500,000 to a Miami charity. That grand jury did,
however, bring all charges against four SabreTech employees. Three were hit
with a $5,000,000 fine and one is wanted for evading arrest and is missing.
His sentencing is pending, since he has not been caught yet.

On May 11, 1999, the third anniversary of the crash, a memorial was
dedicated to the victims of flight 592. Songwriter and musician Rod
MacDonald was so motivated because a fellow musician had died on flight
592, that he wrote the song “Deep Down in the Everglades”, another
memorial to the victims. It was on his next album that was released in 1999.
It was recorded in a small workshop at the 1996 Florida Folk Festival. The
emcee was so moved that he invited MacDonald to sing it on stage at the
main event later that day.

The actual memorial consists of 110 concrete pillars, one for each
victim, bearing the names of each victim. It points to the actual crash site,
eight miles to the north. It is open to the public, and to get to it, you have to
take that gravel road that the park rangers hastily built on the day of the
disaster.

The rest of the airline industry learned some lessons from flight 592.
The FAA mandated that all class D aircraft have smoke detectors in the
cargo holds, the intercom on all commercial airliners be on at all times and
that if there is smoke in the cabin, drop the oxygen masks so people can
breathe until the aircraft returns to its original departure. Also, they have to
have fire extinguishers ready and available in the event of an emergency.
Also, the captain of the plane has to drop the masks in the event of a fire.
This is so there is at least a very slim chance of survivors.

Despite ValuJet’s abrupt death in the courts, it still could not erase the
memory of flight 592 for the families. The memory of seeing that on the
news and hearing on TV that there were no survivors will always be branded
into the memories of those family members. No matter how much money
they are awarded in the courts, no matter how long the ValuJet name will be
tarnished, they will always have that memory. The memory of ValuJet
Airlines flight 592 on Mothers’ Day 1996 and how it changed their lives
forever.