U.S. Agency Cited for Lapses in 2005 Crash

By Matthew L. Wald

Long before the wing fell off a 58-year-old seaplane in Miami, causing a crash that killed all 20 people on board, the Federal Aviation Administration should have known that the airline was failing to inspect and maintain its antique fleet, other U.S. safety officials said.

In an unusually pointed criticism of the agency, the National Transportation Safety Board ranked regulatory failure as an equal cause of the crash along with the failure of the airline, Chalk’s Ocean Airway, to properly repair cracks. The plane went down on Dec. 19, 2005.

“It glares at you that this was a poorly operated airline,” the chairman of the safety board, Mark Rosenker, said Wednesday.

But a lawyer for the airline, which operated scheduled seaplane service between Florida and the Bahamas, said it had followed all the rules. After the crash, Chalk’s certificate to operate a scheduled airline was suspended, but it is still flying, by leasing planes and crews from another operator.

Rosenker noted that Congress had passed a law in 1991 requiring tighter standards for old planes after the roof peeled off a Boeing 737 in 1988, but that the Federal Aviation Administration had proposed rules that do not go fully into effect until 2010.

The rules as adopted do not cover planes approved by the government before 1958, thus exempting the plane that crashed in Miami, a 1940s-design Grumman Mallard. The aviation agency told safety board investigators that the number of planes exempted by the provisions was small and the cost for developing maintenance procedures for them would be prohibitively high.

But there were numerous warning signs about Chalk’s, safety board members said, with several citing a letter sent in January 2005 by a captain who quit over safety issues that were evident to pilots.

“Over the past year I have personally seen the maintenance department and programs at Chalk’s decline steadily and sharply,” the pilot wrote to his bosses, 11 months before the crash.

The wreckage showed that the plane crashed because a crack in the skin of the wing had been ineffectively repaired, probably more than once, investigators said. An inspection in March 2005 should have identified the problem but did not, the board said.

After the accident, investigators could not find the records on previous repairs to the wing. A spokesman for the aviation agency, Les Dorr, said it “did not have any indication that Chalk’s maintenance program was inadequate.

“In fact,” Dorr said, “it served them very well for many, many years.”

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