One decade ago, on 2 September 1998, Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the waters near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada. Some of the milestones that have transpired over the intervening ten years are: my two sons graduated from high school and are attending college; my daughter and her family moved to upstate New York, and I continue to struggle, on a daily basis, to make any meaningful progress without my husband, Ray, who was killed in the crash, by my side.When I established the International Aviation Safety Association IASA, on 4 March 1999, it was my passionate desire to right many of the erroneous and long overdue aviation safety issues which the Federal Aviation Administration FAA had willfully overlooked. The deceitful cloak of Cost Benefit Analysis CBA, the FAA’s guiding force for inaction, should have been repudiated and trashed the night of the crash, when 229 innocent human beings were killed. The “translation” of CBA in my humble opinion is Enough human beings must be killed in a plane crash before correcting a dangerous situation, in order for the “fix” to be considered economically feasible.It is a pragmatic and bureaucratic perspective that disavows human worth and familial affiliations. The same CBA model is applied to the economics of any proposed routine and nonlethal technical fix to airplane hardware. There’s no discrimination for human worth.Someone had to speak out for all the senseless deaths and the many families destroyed by the FAA’s lack of attention to:The hazards associated with specific aircraft wiring insulation types, snaked throughout the airliner and long known for their ability to arc when chafed or cracked.The dangers of the metalized Mylar thermal acoustic insulation blankets, present throughout the airframe and highly flammable when ignited by an arcing wire. The FAA was alerted to this deadly hazard by the Civil Aviation Administration of China CAAC in 1996, two years prior to the crash of Flight SR111. The CAAC warned of blanket flammability and its tendency to propagate fire rapidly after experiencing a severe fire on a Chineseregistered B737, but their letter fell on deaf ears.To add insult to injury, an FAA Designated Alteration Station, or DAS Santa Barbara Aerospace, approved the installation of the inflight entertainment system IFEN, which proved incompatible with the doomed Boeing MD11’s electrical configuration. It would later be confirmed that the technical expertise necessary to approve or deny such an installation was manifestly absent yet the system was more or less “rubber stamped” in an expedited and bogus “approval” process. The urgency was predicated upon the profits expected to be made from this inflight gambling system.All of these subsequent revelations translate into a supreme lack of oversight by the FAA. And we are now seeing from Congressional hearings that the FAA is too “cozy” with the airlines it is supposed to regulate see Aviation Safety & Security Digest, ‘Congress Seeks Separation of Agency From Airlines,’ homepage.Any reasonable human being would believe that each and every one of the Canadian Transportation Safety Board’s TSB recommendations, contained in their final report of the Swissair accident, would have been acted upon by the FAA with the utmost expediency. That being said, let us take a look at how important the FAA feels the deaths of the 229 individuals really are, by looking at where some of those recommendations stand 10 years after the crash.As recently as 29 June 2008, a fire broke out in the attic area of a B767, operated by Airborne Express, which eerily resembles what the pilots aboard Swissair Flight 111 experienced. The aircraft was not airborne at the time, and it will be very interesting to learn from the investigation just how similar this incident is when compared to what transpired almost 10 years ago aboard Flight SR111.It would appear that not all flammable materials have been stripped from aircraft, as the TSB urged. The Mylar thermal acoustic insulation blankets were ordered removed, but not without the FAA dragging its feet for a full year before giving the airlines an additional 5 years to accomplish the task. What about other flammable insulation materials? One of the TSB’s strong recommendations stated:

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