National Transportation Safety Board

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Two New Jerseyans were killed when a small plane crashed near the end of a runway at Rickenbacker International Airport. The plane was bound for New Jersey when it crashed and caught fire shortly before 9 a.m. Sunday, killing pilot Viswanathan Rajaraman, 54, and passenger Mary Sundaram, 50, both of Franklin Lakes. The plane was registered to Buds Aviation in Franklin Lakes. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

A former Conrail engineer, already convicted of manslaughter in a train wreck that killed 16 people, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Baltimore yesterday on charges of conspiracy, obstructing investigators and lying to a federal safety board. The four-count indictment charges that engineer Ricky L. Gates and brakeman Edward W. Cromwell conspired to "obstruct and impede" an investigation of the January 1986 crash with an Amtrak passenger train near Baltimore. The indictment alleges that the pair lied to federal investigators and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)

Statistically speaking, the government says you could take one scheduled U.S. airline flight every day for the next 4,000 years - that's 1.46 million flights - without the airplane crashing. And if the plane you are on does have an accident, the odds you would survive are 50-50. But despite that record, people in charge of preventing aviation accidents and of running airports smoothly even if something does go wrong know that they could always learn more about keeping the system safe.

City Controller Jonathan Saidel has asked for a federal investigation of safety complaints stemming from Philadelphia Gas Works' use of substitute workers during its current labor dispute. Saidel yesterday said "only an independent party" could determine if public safety was jeopardized by the use of "inexperienced crews" while 1,800 regular workers stay off the job in what the union calls a lockout and the company calls a strike. Saidel, a member of the Gas Commission, also sent acting chief executive officer Alfred P. Degen a separate letter expressing concern about safety complaints.

It would be a little like finding out that Ralph Nader owns a string of used car dealerships under investigation for selling lemons to the public. Or that federal workers suffered food poisoning after lunching in the cafeteria operated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In this case, the Federal Aviation Administration, the nation's chief enforcement arm for air safety, was criticized by an independent oversight agency for running its own badly managed and sometimes unsafe fleet of 53 planes and 1,000 pilots - used to inspect the safety of commuter and commercial airlines.

Californians have one simple way to measure the seriousness of an earthquake - whether or not it's The Big One, the mega-earthquake that some think will ultimately help the entire West Coast secede from the Union, by blowing it off the face of the Earth. We admit to having a similar reaction to the Philadelphia Gas Works plant explosion that rocked the city Friday night. Was it the Big One, the catastrophe waiting to happen because a financially unstable company has been unable to afford to maintain safety standards?

As the Hungarian victims of last week's Ride the Ducks accident headed home yesterday, the National Transportation Safety Board said one crewman on the tugboat that pushed a barge into the tourist vessel refused to meet with investigators. The crewman, the boat's first mate, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and was not identified by the NTSB. Darrell Wilson, spokesman for K-Sea Transportation, which operated the tugboat, declined to comment but said the company had provided all five crewmen with legal counsel.

Concerned about "the potential for serious accidents," the National Transportation Safety Board yesterday called for a nationwide review of jetliner brake standards, particularly for some models of DC-10s. The action came after investigation of a May 21 American Airlines DC-10-30 accident at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport revealed that eight of the plane's 10 brakes had failed during an aborted takeoff. The aircraft ran off the runway at more than 100 m.p.h., injuring eight people and damaging the plane.

On a crumbling railroad bridge over Tioga Street in North Philadelphia last November, SEPTA general manager Louis J. Gambaccini warned that the "clock is running out" on the decaying rail system. "We're getting so close to the wire, we'd have to close down major parts of the system for safety reasons," Gambaccini told reporters. "We're at the ragged edge. " Has the day of reckoning finally arrived? Is SEPTA safe? Is it time to shut the system down? Such questions have become the focus of a lively debate in the last two weeks as more and more evidence surfaces to question the safety of SEPTA's long-neglected subway and commuter rail network.

The agency charged with uncovering safety problems in the nation's land, sea and air transportation systems is being accused by one of its most prominent officials of not being as tough and impartial as it once was. James Burnett Jr., the former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and still its senior member, also said in an interview that his views were being stifled and that he had been the victim of censorship. "This board is less pro-active and somewhat less aggressive on safety issues than I think boards have tended to be before," said Burnett, whose term expires at the end of the year but who is likely to remain on the NTSB into next year.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Two New Jerseyans were killed when a small plane crashed near the end of a runway at Rickenbacker International Airport. The plane was bound for New Jersey when it crashed and caught fire shortly before 9 a.m. Sunday, killing pilot Viswanathan Rajaraman, 54, and passenger Mary Sundaram, 50, both of Franklin Lakes. The plane was registered to Buds Aviation in Franklin Lakes. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

The Coast Guard's acting port captain for Philadelphia said Wednesday that "all options are on the table" as to whether he would allow duck tours to resume operations off Penn's Landing. On July 7 a 250-foot barge struck a small amphibious vessel stalled in the shipping channel near Penn's Landing with 35 passengers on board, killing two young Hungarian tourists. The accident has raised questions of whether small passenger boats can operate safely in the Delaware River, whose busy shipping channel is just 400 feet wide.

As the Hungarian victims of last week's Ride the Ducks accident headed home yesterday, the National Transportation Safety Board said one crewman on the tugboat that pushed a barge into the tourist vessel refused to meet with investigators. The crewman, the boat's first mate, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and was not identified by the NTSB. Darrell Wilson, spokesman for K-Sea Transportation, which operated the tugboat, declined to comment but said the company had provided all five crewmen with legal counsel.

In the frantic minutes before Duck 34 capsized, its crew tried in vain to send a distress signal to the tugboat driving a barge in their direction, and then desperately tried to sound an airhorn only to have it fail, according to an account provided Friday night by the National Transportation Safety Board. The rough chronology, based on interviews with the two crew members and 16 of the 33 surviving passengers, provides the first official account of the minutes leading up to Wednesday's fatal accident on the Delaware River.

Californians have one simple way to measure the seriousness of an earthquake - whether or not it's The Big One, the mega-earthquake that some think will ultimately help the entire West Coast secede from the Union, by blowing it off the face of the Earth. We admit to having a similar reaction to the Philadelphia Gas Works plant explosion that rocked the city Friday night. Was it the Big One, the catastrophe waiting to happen because a financially unstable company has been unable to afford to maintain safety standards?

It would be a little like finding out that Ralph Nader owns a string of used car dealerships under investigation for selling lemons to the public. Or that federal workers suffered food poisoning after lunching in the cafeteria operated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In this case, the Federal Aviation Administration, the nation's chief enforcement arm for air safety, was criticized by an independent oversight agency for running its own badly managed and sometimes unsafe fleet of 53 planes and 1,000 pilots - used to inspect the safety of commuter and commercial airlines.

Statistically speaking, the government says you could take one scheduled U.S. airline flight every day for the next 4,000 years - that's 1.46 million flights - without the airplane crashing. And if the plane you are on does have an accident, the odds you would survive are 50-50. But despite that record, people in charge of preventing aviation accidents and of running airports smoothly even if something does go wrong know that they could always learn more about keeping the system safe.

City Controller Jonathan Saidel has asked for a federal investigation of safety complaints stemming from Philadelphia Gas Works' use of substitute workers during its current labor dispute. Saidel yesterday said "only an independent party" could determine if public safety was jeopardized by the use of "inexperienced crews" while 1,800 regular workers stay off the job in what the union calls a lockout and the company calls a strike. Saidel, a member of the Gas Commission, also sent acting chief executive officer Alfred P. Degen a separate letter expressing concern about safety complaints.

On a crumbling railroad bridge over Tioga Street in North Philadelphia last November, SEPTA general manager Louis J. Gambaccini warned that the "clock is running out" on the decaying rail system. "We're getting so close to the wire, we'd have to close down major parts of the system for safety reasons," Gambaccini told reporters. "We're at the ragged edge. " Has the day of reckoning finally arrived? Is SEPTA safe? Is it time to shut the system down? Such questions have become the focus of a lively debate in the last two weeks as more and more evidence surfaces to question the safety of SEPTA's long-neglected subway and commuter rail network.