rd, 1984).
In mid December 1985, an Arrow Air DC 8 crashed on takeoff in Newfoundland. The flight was a part of a contract with the Department of Defense. All 258 persons aboard were killed. This crash brought to 1,948 the total number of people killed in commercial air crashes in the western countries in 1985 561 of those deaths resulted from crashes of American airliners (Hawkins and Bernstein, 1986). Both crew training deficiencies and aircraft maintenance deficiencies were cited as probable causes for the Arrow Air crash (Hawkins and Bernstein, 1986). Substandard maintenance and crew error had been linked to other crashes involving passenger deaths in 1985.
On the heels of the Arrow crash, the results of a survey of professional airline pilots in the United States was released (Dallas Times Herald, 1985). Of the 1,200 commercial passenger pilots surveyed, 63.5 percent stated that deregulation had made air travel more dangerous. Half of the pilots stated that the quality of aircraft maintenance had suffered as a
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