The airline industry is not in any better shape.  It has been plagued by takeover wars and asset stripping, by high fuel prices, and sky high operational losses due to deregulation.  Now, the society pays the price for this deregulation, and it pays it with its life.  In the healthy years of the airline industry (in the 1970s) the average life-span of an airliner was 4 years, which was considered normal.  By 1995 the duty cycle of the carrier's fleet had been stretched out to 14 years, which is reflected in increased failures and crashes.  It is self-evident that safety suffers when the aging aircraft are not being scrapped, as they should be, but are kept in the air for an additional ten years of 'service.'

For some air-carriers, even this irresponsible service extension is not enough.  The low maintenance discount carriers operate aircraft today that have yet another ten years 'on their back.'  Some of the low maintenance carriers operate a fleet that is over 26 years old.  It would be prohibitively expensive to maintain such a fleet at a state of safety that matches that of a 4 year old aircraft.

A "low maintenance" carrier is not one that fails to meet regulation.  Deregulation has done away with a lot of necessary requirements and allowed the industry to set its own standards and requirements.  A "low maintenance" carrier is typically one that does not match the maintenance activity to the age of the aircraft.  With increasing age the maintenance requirements go up exponentially.  There are airliners in the sky, today, that are over 27 years old, and are still flying, and people trust their life to them, foolishly.

At an average of 5 fights per day, these planes would have gone through app. 98,000 takeoff and landing procedures.  It would require an enormous amount of maintenance work to constantly inspect the aging air-frames for metal fatigue that increases with age.  The physical reality suggests that the proper maintenance of a 27 year old airliner should be massively expensive.  This is why the airlines which operate these aging planes need to be classified as low maintenance carriers, as much of the vital maintenance simply doesn't get done.  Their flights should be called suicide flights.

Some years ago, most of the ancient planes that crowd the sky today might not have been allowed to fly freight, much less people.  But today, thanks to the deregulation of the industry, any insanity that makes a buck is perfectly legal.  On May 11, 1996, 110 people lost their life when one of the low maintenance aircraft finally crashed.  The plane had been in service for 27 years and suffered ten prior failures..

Perhaps it was metal fatigue leading to structural failure that brought Valujet flight 592 down into the swamps of the Florida Everglades.  The plane had suffered these ten prior failures over two years, causing flights to be aborted.  To what age the ancient fleet will ultimately remain in service, no one really knows.  One might expect to see them in the air for quite a while longer, in today's world of scarce investment funds.

The term Valujet has taken on a whole different meaning after the crash of one of its planes, for a few weeks, anyway.  In the larger sense, however, little has changed in the industry because of it.  The fact remains that value is sought in being cheap, no matter the costs.  In a very real way, the society is throwing its life away for the love of money, that ironically, causes it to have none and to loose in the process the most precious it has.

It should be recognized that the global lack of money is not the result of a depleted resource.  Money is not a type of resource that can be depleted.  The lack of money, literally results from the love of money.  For the sake of maximizing financial profits artificial allocation constraints are imposed, that drive the value of money sky-high.  This inflation is combined with the wholesale 'theft' of investment capital from the real economy, by the speculative financial industry (so-called).  The physical breakdown of the society's infrastructures is directly proportionate to the imposed supply constraints and the intensity of the theft through speculative processes that the constraints enable.

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche