The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [104]
Mary Schiavo, the inspector general of the Department of Transportation (of which the FAA is a part), also served up some choice quotes. “We shouldn’t have to wait for another plane to drop out of the sky for the FAA to take action,” she is fond of saying. Having made something of a professional fetish out of spare airline parts since her arrival in 1990—sometimes devoting more than half of her staff of investigators to the matter—Schiavo brought scads of shocking stories and bogus parts with her when she testified before Congress or the news media.17
Only one major crash had been attributed to a counterfeit part. In 1989 a Norwegian charter flight with fifty-five people aboard ended up in the North Sea after bolts in its tail section broke apart. Pictures of that airplane, which had been recovered in pieces and painstakingly reassembled in a hanger, served as the principal illustrations for several scare stories, including ABC’s newsmagazine, “Primetime.” Brian Ross, identified on screen as “ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent,” flew to Norway and had himself filmed beside the plane. There were, said Ross, many more defective parts in the aviation pipeline, “parts that could be putting thousands of lives at risk, raising serious questions about just how good a job the FAA is doing on a critical safety issue.”18
Ross’s report was enough to make you reach for a life jacket, but the operative word is could Thousands of lives might have been put at risk. The FAA may have been doing a lousy job. But apparently, neither is the case. Were the problem as serious as Ross and Schiavo suggest, how come more than a half million flights are completed every week without incident?19
The level of illogic was high in news coverage of the bogus parts issue, but the story had legs. In June 1996, a year and a half after the “Primetime” segment aired, the reconstructed Norwegian plane appeared in the U.S. press again. A photo of it filled nearly half a page in a Business Week cover story titled, “Warning! Bogus parts have turned up in commercial jets. Where’s the FAA?” Largely a rehash of material contained in earlier TV and print reports, the article did have a new hook. A Valujet airliner had crashed a few weeks earlier in Florida, killing 110 people. By means of some fancy word work, Business Week’s reporter, Willy Stern, connected the bogus parts issue to that crash.
There is no reason to believe that bad parts played a role in the Valujet crash. Stern forged the connection circuitously by relating the crash to an accident a year earlier. On that previous occasion, the engine in another Valujet aircraft had exploded prior to takeoff, possibly as the result of a mismanufactured part. “The accident,” Stern wrote, “caused no fatalities—unlike last month’s crash of Valujet Flight 592 into the Everglades. But in some ways, it was more ominous, because it highlights a safety issue that affects every carrier in the air: the growing stream of substandard or bogus parts that are finding their way into commercial aircraft.”20
If this seems like a weird claim—an accident in which no one died is more ominous than a crash that killed everyone onboard?—Stern’s pronouncement that the airline industry is “underregulated” is weirder still. Had he been writing in The Nation, MotherJones,or some other liberal or progressive publication, such a statement might be expected. But Business Week isn’t exactly noted for endorsing greater government regulation of big business. In fact, when I ran a Nexis search of the contents of Business Week for the previous five years to see if I could turn up other occurrences of the word underregulate,