Airline returned aging DC-9s to skies

The DC-9 has long been a workhorse of U.S. aviation.

From 1958 to 1975, McDonnell Douglas and its predecessor Douglas Aircraft manufactured 976 of them.

"It is one of the most reliable planes in aviation history," ValuJet President Lewis Jordan said Saturday.

But as the airline industry upgraded to bigger, newer planes in the late 1980s, many of the old DC-9s were being retired.

But DC-9s returned to the skies -- primarily because of ValuJet, an Atlanta carrier that began buying the used planes at cheap prices. ValuJet's 51-airplane fleet included 48 DC-9s.

The DC-9-32 that crashed Saturday was built in 1969, Jordan said. It was one of the first four planes purchased by ValuJet, which began flying in October 1993 with two airplanes.

Jordan said the plane, with a tail registration of N904VJ, had undergone regularly scheduled maintenance, including light maintenance in May and March, and heavier maintenance in October.

Experts cautioned that it is too early to speculate about the cause of Saturday's crash, but some recalled other fatal DC-9 crashes.

The most recent occurred in 1994 near North Carolina's Charlotte-Douglas Airport, when a DC-9-30 crashed in a thunderstorm, killing 37 of 57 people on board.

In 1983, an Air Canada DC-9 flying from Dallas to Toronto made an emergency landing at the Greater Cincinnati Airport after a fire broke out on the plane about 90 minutes into the flight. Twenty-three people were killed.

Testimony at a National Transportation Safety Board hearing on that crash centered on the plane's electrical system, particularly the wiring in the toilet-flushing motor in a rear lavatory.

Also in 1994, a DC-9 flown by British tour operator Airtours made an emergency landing in Manchester, England, after a fire broke out in the rear galley. No one was killed.

Investigators will be somewhat hampered in their investigation of Saturday's crash because the DC-9 has an old-style flight recorder, which measures only nine different aircraft functions, said an NTSB official.

Newer airplanes have black boxes with 70 sensors measuring functions including air speed, throttle position, engine speed and fuel and electrical readings.

Bill Tiedeman, a former Eastern pilot who flew the DC-9 for 12 years, said it is too early to say what caused the fire.

"Smoke in the cockpit in itself is not all that serious," he said. "A lot of little things can happen in an airplane."

Tiedeman noted that in Miami's previous worst airplane crash, in 1972, there were no major problems with the L1011 that went down in the Everglades.

"It crashed because no one was paying attention,'' he said. "All three guys in the cockpit were working on the problem. No one was flying the airplane."