ValuJet Airlines

» see valujet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

ValuJet flew its first route on 26 October 1993, Atlanta to Tampa, and it grew at a speed that now reads as the warning rather than the achievement. Four years later it had 48 aircraft, mostly aging DC-9s bought cheap on the secondhand market, serving 22 cities in the United States and one in Canada. The model was the one everybody recognizes now: contract out everything that is not the actual flying, then undercut the majors by enough that people will accept the difference.

The contracting-out is the part that mattered. ValuJet did not do its own heavy maintenance, and on 11 May 1996 Flight 592 crashed into the Everglades minutes after leaving Miami, killing all 110 people on board. The cause was a fire in the forward cargo hold, started by chemical oxygen generators that a maintenance contractor had stripped out of other aircraft and handed over, uncapped and mislabeled, to be carried as company material.

The FAA grounded the airline on 11 June 1996 and let it fly again on 26 September with a fleet cut to fifteen aircraft. The airline survived on paper and the brand did not. On 24 September 1997 company president D. Joseph Corr said the name was being permanently retired, and on 17 November 1997 the holding company completed its acquisition of Airways Corporation, parent of a small carrier called AirTran, and took that name for itself.

~ the case file ~

~ the crash ~

Flight 592 is one of the accidents that changed the rules rather than just the airline. The generators were hazardous cargo that nobody had documented as hazardous cargo, and the contractor's mechanics had signed off on safety caps that were never actually installed. They were then loaded into a class D cargo hold, meaning no fire detection and no suppression in it at all, on the theory that a sealed compartment would starve a fire of oxygen, which is precisely the wrong theory when the cargo manufactures oxygen.

The FAA subsequently required detection and suppression in those holds. The accident also became the standard reference for how far an airline's safety responsibility extends when it has outsourced the work, which was the live question about ValuJet specifically and the low-cost model generally.

~ the grounding ~

The month between the crash and the grounding is the uncomfortable part of the record. FAA inspectors had been documenting problems at ValuJet before May 1996, and an internal recommendation to consider grounding the airline had been written in February of that year. The agency was simultaneously charged with promoting the industry and policing it, and the split mandate got removed by Congress afterward.

When ValuJet came back in September it was a third of its former size and carrying a name that every American had heard in one specific context. Bookings did not recover. An airline can operate at a loss for a while, but it cannot operate at a loss while its name is doing active damage to every fare search.

~ the name swap ~

The mechanics of the ending are worth being precise about, because the company did not die. ValuJet Inc. bought Airways Corporation, and the combined holding company renamed itself AirTran Holdings. The larger, better-known, financially stronger party in the transaction was the one that gave up its name. In the summer of 1998 both airlines came onto a single FAA certificate and AirTran Airways was what remained.

In 1993 I was nine years old and five years away from my first modem, and a discount airline in Georgia was as far from anything I could reach as a thing can be. What kept the story legible from here is that Southwest bought AirTran in 2011 and retired that name too, and by then almost nothing connected the brand to the Everglades. AirTran kept a warehouse in Atlanta full of ValuJet material, radio spots included, and made no public mention of any of it.

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