While Michael Crichton's latest book, Airframe, sat atop the bestseller list in the US, Federal Aviation Administration officials were surveying the crash site of a Comair EMB.120. Coming after a record year of commercial aviation accidents, the crash and the book are notable for doing the same thing: undermining - again - the public's frayed confidence in US aviation safety.
In writing Airframe, Crichton was obviously aided by the airing of the FAA's dirty laundry after last May's crash of ValuJet 511. He besieges the agency, at points relentlessly. And, this might be the first New York Times bestseller to include a summary of the airline industry's cost-cutting binge over the past five years (missing labour, however) and an argument in favour of reregulation of airlines:
'. . . [Government] deregulates airlines, and everybody cheers. But the carriers have to cut costs. So the food is awful. That's okay. There are fewer direct flights, more hubs. That's okay. The planes look grubby, because they redo the interiors less often. That's okay. But still the carriers have to cut more costs. So they run the planes longer, buy fewer new ones. That's okay - for a while . . . I got a hundred bucks, they'll reregulate within ten years. There'll be a string of crashes, and they'll do it.'
Of course, Crichton's talk about restoring regulation has to be put in the appropriate context: not very long ago, he wrote about dinosaurs being brought back from the dead.
Source: Airline Business
