cond half of the decade of the eighties, both the number of air crashes and the number of lives lost in air disasters declined significantly from the levels experienced during the 1981 1985 time period. Concerns over safety, particularly those associated with crew training and equipment maintenance, however, continued strong (Reingold 31 32). A major focus of the concerns over airline safety in the contemporary time period is that the Federal Aviation Administration often overlooks safety violations by airlines in the deregulated environment, leaving the airline companies to police themselves, and that the airlines themselves often sacrifice safety on the altar of economics (Calonius 85, 87, 89 90; Airline safety 104).
The crash in the spring of 1992 of an airliner at La Guardia Airport, in which icing on the wings was implicated as a causal factor, intensified the debates over (1) the role de icing plays in air transportation safety, and (2) the extent to which pilots are responsible for air transportation problems.
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