Flight 592: How the Everglades disaster changed aviation forever

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]That crash not only made an indelible impact on Southwest Florida, but on the airline industry as a whole. In fact, this crash led to revised FAA standards aimed at preventing a scenario like the one that brought down flight 592. Our chief wink investigates reporter Corress Nylander has been looking into all of these changes, breaks it down for us. He joins us live from RSW.

[00:00:28]Yeah, well Lois, today commercial airlines like the many we've been seeing take off from Southwest Florida International Airport today all have some advanced safety features that many of us probably take for granted. Well, that wasn't the case 30 years ago.

[00:00:41]Really the entire industry operated off of a theory about how to control cargo bay fires, which proved to of course be a very deadly mistake. I sat down with Gregory Feith. At the time he was the lead NTSB investigator for the ValuJet crash scene. He spent months going through the muck of the glades trying to pinpoint exactly what went wrong and how to make sure it does not happen ever again.

[00:01:07]Uh smoke in the cabin, smoke in the cabin. May 11th, 1996.

[00:01:11]It's a day that would define NTSB investigator Gregory Feith's career. I speak about it often. ValuJet was a turning point when it came to really drawing out and recognizing in-flight fires. ValuJet flight 592 heading from Miami to Atlanta would spend no more than 10 minutes in the air before crashing into the Everglades. Feith was in Washington D.C. when he got the call.

[00:01:35]He gathered his team and a few short hours later he was hovering over the crash site. In his 16 years of NTSB experience up to that point, he found little comparison. We saw the impact crater. We knew that it was a high dynamic, high energy impact. The aircraft fragmented. We know that, you you at least part of it probably was submerged. It was spread over a very large area and that was my concern was how were we going to cover that vast area. They covered it, but it took a grueling 3 months. The box itself is in pretty good shape. We won't know about the tape until later on tonight. Fife and his team lived in biohazard suits and chest waders. They fought 90° heat, jagged saw grass, and the constant threat of the glades natural predators.

[00:02:23]We had sharpshooters out on the airboats. They would take potshots into the water to scare the gators and we had a lot of snakes. From the wreckage, they found 144 oxygen tanks that weren't supposed to be on the plane. The investigation determined they had ignited in the forward cargo hold creating an inferno that couldn't be stopped. Those that sound is the oxygen generators releasing their oxygen under this higher temperatures. At the time, cargo holds were class D designed to be airtight to starve fires of oxygen. We saw the trend, we saw the need, we wrote the recommendation, and really moved the industry to getting rid of these these class D cargo holds and moving them to full suppression. It wasn't an easy fix. The industry resisted the cost for years. We know that they would not have taken off had they had a smoke detector in the cargo compartment which would have alerted the flight crew.

[00:03:18]Eventually, at the beginning of the new millennium, the rules did change. Fife knows nothing can bring those 110 souls back, but he's confident that if the same thing happened today, that flight wouldn't have gone down. They don't have those 30 years of memories to make with their their particular friends, family, loved ones. There's never closure, but if I can continue to help them understand what may have occurred and the fact that their loved one did not die in vain.

[00:03:50]And Fife went on to retire from the NTSB about 5 years later, but to this day he remains heavily involved in aviation safety discussions and education. He tells me that the ValuJet crash remains a constant topic he brings up for educational purposes in his 20-plus years with the NTSB. He told me this was definitely in the top two of the cases he had to deal with and perhaps the most complex site that he had to work to try and get all of that evidence. As he described, the Everglades were very unforgiving, but certainly it can't be understated the impacts that this incident had on the aviation industry. Lois.

[00:04:29]All right, thank you very much, Corrus.

[00:04:30]It is a very punishing environment, no doubt about it. And hopefully their work will live on to protect others who step on a plane every single day.

[00:04:40]Back to you in the studio here from the ValuJet crash site.

[00:04:44]It's great that we get to remember all the people who gave their lives, but also important that we remember the heroes that Lois and Corrus and Maddie have been showing us who made sure that something came out of it.

[00:04:54]>> Yeah, so many things changed because of that. Lives, of course, but all these rules and that's why it's important to look back so we can then continue to move forward in a way that's going to keep us all safe. Like he said, they did not die in vain.

[00:05:05]We'll have more for you in just a moment. Stay with us.