Fly the fiery skies: long after ValuJet, many planes still don't have smoke detectors or fire extinguishers in their cargo holds.

• Author: Evans, David
• Position: ValuJet Airlines Inc.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) was apoplectic. "Any more needless deaths and well be crucifying you people!" he thundered. The unlucky souls on the receiving end of this tirade were a group of Federal Aviation Administration officials, assembled for a May 15 hearing of the House Aviation Transportation Subcommittee. The reason for DeFazio's rage: the discovery that, six months after the chiefs of America's largest airlines had stood with President Clinton at the White House and declared the installation of fire detectors a priority project, not one new extinguisher or detector had been installed. What particularly incensed DeFazio was the fact that the idea of using detectors and extinguishers had been around for years. "We had recommendations 13 years ago, we had another recommendation nine years ago from the National Transportation Safety Board, and both of these were in shucked off by the FAA as unnecessary and unwarranted." The result: Sixteen months after ValuJet flight 592 plunged into the Florida Everglades, in a crash where fire consumed the insides of the airplane, some 3,300 of America's 4,600 jetliners are still flying with neither fire detectors nor extinguishers in their cargo holds.

The Hole in the Theory

Fire detectors and pressurized bottles of Halon -- a highly effective fire fighting agent -- have long been used in the cargo holds of larger jets like the Boeing 777 and the Lockheed L-1011. But for years the airline industry has argued that the smaller cargo holds on smaller planes could contain any fire with their insulating blankets and nearly airtight construction. In theory, flames would be snuffed out through oxygen starvation, rendering fire detectors and Halon extinguishers unnecessary.

But the theory ignores the fact that the holds of these smaller jets, like the popular Boeing 737, are increasingly packed with hazardous cargo that render the "fire-prevention-through-oxygen-starvation" strategy grossly inadequate. The ValuJet disaster was the first case to bring this problem to the public's attention. That crash was apparently caused when the oxygen from a load of mislabeled canisters placed in the plane's cargo hold fanned an electrical fire into a fatal white-hot conflagration. The airtight construction theory had not accounted for the addition of more oxygen from the canisters. Of course, even if there had been Halon bottles in the plane's hold, the 110 people aboard flight 592 might not have been saved; the flow of...