ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, May 14, 1996 TAG: 9605140059
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MIAMI
SOURCE: From the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press
NOTE: Lede
Sharpshooters watched for alligators and poisonous water moccasins Monday in the steamy Everglades as divers recovered human remains and a ``black box'' flight data recorder from the crash site of ValuJet Flight 592.
``This is tough stuff out there,'' said National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Robert Francis, who is leading the investigation of the crash that killed all 109 aboard the DC-9 jetliner Saturday afternoon.
If it is not severely damaged, the black box found Monday afternoon could provide important clues as to why Flight 592 crashed.
Investigators hope it will provide a readout of technical aspects of the last minutes of the flight, including the plane's heading, altitude and airspeed. They said the chance exists that the device was a spare that was not operating.
Divers had yet to find the plane's other black box, which records pilot conversations and other sounds in the cockpit.
In Washington, President Clinton ordered Transportation Secretary Federico Pena to report to him this week ``on additional measures the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration can take to ensure that all our airlines continue to operate at the highest level of safety.''
White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said Pena will look to see if he can add more FAA inspectors promptly to check aircraft and flight procedures. The agency has hired 230 inspectors this year and the administration has requested funds for 150 more for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, McCurry said.
Although the U.S. air travel system, with 1.5 million passengers a day, is the world's safest, ``No one should ever be satisfied completely with the quality of our protections for air travel,'' McCurry said.
Sunday, the FAA announced that it will intensify a review of ValuJet's safety and maintenance. FAA inspectors were to ride in ValuJet cockpits and review the company's maintenance facilities for the next month.
Lewis Jordan, who founded ValuJet in 1993 as a low-price airline, said Monday that his company ``would never cut a corner on safety. We pay the highest degree of attention to it at all times.''
CBS News reported that the FAA was to be investigated by the Department of Transportation as part of an overall probe being conducted after the crash.
CBS said the Department of Transportation was looking into the possibility the FAA knew ValuJet was headed for trouble before the crash. The network said the FAA declined to comment on the probe.
The discount airline has had at least three accidents since it began operations in 1993. The most serious before the Florida crash was a runway fire last year that destroyed a plane and burned a flight attendant.
Officials said it could be days - and perhaps weeks - before all the human remains and bits of wreckage are recovered from the marsh.
Dade County Medical Examiner Joseph Davis said that although DNA experts will help the pathologists, some of the remains may never be identified.
``We go to great pains to preserve the dignity of the remains,'' said Metro-Dade Lt. Robert Lengel, director of operations for the medical examiner. ``But you're dealing with a very big site and thousands of parts, so we have to do the best we can. We don't want to rush.''
Relatives of crash victims waited anxiously back at Miami airport hotels. ``They seem to care more about the plane than they care about the bodies,'' said Rosetta Jones, who lost her daughter, Landry, in the crash. ``I don't care about the black box. I just want my daughter.''
``They should have had a crane or a radar or something. They've got that kind of equipment,'' said Raquel Perry, daughter-in-law of crash victim Wilhemina Perry of Miami. ``By the time they get out there, with those alligators and stuff, she'll be all ate up.''
Under a sun Monday, 30 police divers dressed in heavy biohazard protective suits and masks slogged and swam through rotting vegetation, oozing mud and murky water at the crash site, using touch more than sight to recover whatever they could.
A recovery worker found the data recorder by stepping on it, Francis said. It was bent but in good shape. Such boxes on the 27-year-old planes record fewer details than those on newer jets.
Francis also said the jet's engines would undergo a thorough examination but ``an early inspection of both of the engines [shows] that there is no projectile damage apparent, thus no catastrophic damage.''
Several plans - building a bridge to a road 300 yards away, erecting dikes and draining the marsh around the crash site, towing in large cranes mounted on barges - have been suggested for speeding the retrieval process, but officials say there are flaws in all of the proposals.
NTSB officials said a fragment of the plane 8 feet long was the largest they had seen. Both engines were found in about 2 feet of water.
Thus far, the cause of the accident remains a mystery.
Officials say that about 10 minutes after the jetliner took off from Miami International Airport on a flight to Atlanta, the co-pilot radioed an urgent message that the cockpit and passenger cabin were rapidly filling with smoke.
He requested and received clearance for an immediate return to Miami. Then, as the plane turned south, the co-pilot asked instead for clearance to land at the nearest airfield - Opa-locka Airport, about 15 miles northwest of Miami.
Greg Feith, the NTSB official managing the field investigation, said the request for an alternate landing site was the last intelligible radio transmission from the jetliner.
About 10 seconds later, Feith said, Flight 592 disappeared from air traffic controllers' radar screens.
The pilot of a small plane said he saw the jetliner curve downward at a steep angle and plunge nose-first into the swampy Everglades marsh. Rescuers flying over the crash site minutes later said all recognizable signs of the plane and its human cargo had sunk from sight.
Knight-Ridder/Tribune contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. A recovery crew begins sifting through the debrisby CNBMonday at the crash site in the Everglades of ValuJet Flight 592.
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