These things take time--lots of time.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills

If you think the Coast Guard followed a too-little and too-slow policy in responding to the safety needs of those ferry passengers, consider the Federal Aviation Administration's response to the danger of another fuel tank explosion like the one that brought down TWA's Flight 800. That accident happened in 1996. Nine years later, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, reports Matthew Wald in The New York Times, "complained to the Federal Aviation Administration that it had slowed to a crawl on changes needed to prevent a similar accident."

In 1996, "the safety board called for pumping the tanks full of inert gas so they could not explode" In 2004, "the FAA said it was close to proposing" such a rule but it has yet to do so.

Before Flight 800 left New York, its departure had been delayed more than an hour. Heat from the planes' air-conditioning unit, located next to the fuel tank, caused the temperature in the tank to become dangerously high, making it...