Swissair widow
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Safety first, Flight 111 widow vows | ![]() |
Lyn Romano examines a piece of Kapton insulated wire from the Florida Everglades Value Jet crash during the startup meeting of her aviation safety group Monday at her home. | |
By Stephen Thorne / The Canadian Press Goldens Bridge, N.Y. - The widow of a Swissair crash victim has formed an international aviation safety group - with a little help from a ring on her finger. Lyn Romano's husband Ray died in seat 9F when Flight 111 went down off Nova Scotia last Sept. 2. She's vowed to pressure airlines and regulators until she's satisfied they've put safety ahead of profits. Romano, 44, has rounded up experts and crash families from all over the world. Today, they meet for the first time at her home. "If the Federal Aviation Authority was doing what I thought my tax dollars were paying them to do, that plane would not have crashed," says Romano, who phoned authorities every day for seven weeks looking for her husband's wedding band. It was engraved with the words Love Lyn and their wedding date, 10-3-81. Officials told her they'd never find the tiny ring among the carnage 70 metres below the ocean surface off Peggys Cove. But one day she got a call. The ring had surfaced, still on Ray's hand, buried in a tangle of wires and wreckage heaved on the deck of the U.S. navy salvage ship Grapple. "I put that ring on my husband's hand and even that . . . plane crash with all of the horror and all of the body parts ... couldn't take that ring off." It took a lot of persuasion to get the ring back. Some authorities, including Nova Scotia's chief medical examiner, wanted to keep it because it was technically still part of the investigation. Now, on her darkest days, when the pain and the frustration seem too much to bear, Romano looks at the gold ring she wears next to her own wedding band and resolves to carry on. She doesn't blame pilot Urs Zimmermann, whom some have criticized for delaying an emergency landing at Halifax after detecting cockpit smoke. "That guy didn't want to go down that night, I don't care what any voice recorder says." But she does blame the industry, which has known for years about problems with some wiring insulations, the dangers inherent to some cockpit checklist procedures and the inadequacy of its own safety standards. "It's politics and it's money. That's what it comes down to. How many people have to go before these people open their goddamn eyes? Romano was always terrified of flying. Her husband of nearly 18 years loved aircraft. As a partner in KPMG Peat Marwick, he flew all the time. She often begged him not to go. On Sept. 2, it was no different. At 11 o'clock that night, she turned on the television to watch the 11 o'clock news. "I'm watching this and I saw Swissair but it didn't even dawn on me. Then I thought: 'Hold on ... Swissair.' " Like she always did, she had her husband's travel itinerary in her pocketbook with his flight number, his seat number, his departure and arrival times, and his hotel phone. It was a while before she dared open it. "I was kneeling in front of the TV in my bedroom and I was reading it," she recalled, her voice wavering. "Everything they were saying was matching this itinerary." It was more than an hour before shock set in and she started to shake. She began dialing 800 numbers posted on the TV screen. Finally she got through and read the itinerary to a faceless person at the other end. She was told the information could not be released. The more they talked, the more frustrated she became. Then the clincher: "Do you have family nearby?" She didn't receive confirmation her husband was on the plane until 4:30 a.m., and it was nearly 8 a.m. before it was confirmed he was dead. "They know who's on those planes - they have the boarding passes," Romano says now. "These things have to be changed. "This is just pure torture what they did. Because all they're doing is running around their offices saying: 'What do we do now?' " All 229 aboard Swissair Flight 111 were killed. The three Romano children were now fatherless. Three weeks later, Lyn Romano landed at Shearwater, a Nova Scotia military base, where investigators and pathology teams had set up camp. She was taken inside a trailer where she walked past row upon row of personal effects - baby shoes, stuffed toys, luggage. Finally she confronted the carry-on bag she had packed, like she always did, for her husband. "I packed him a journal of accountancy, a car magazine because he was in the process of restoring a 1968 GTO convertible - he loved cars - and a Forbes. It was all there. "The bag was shredded but the magazines, his business cards, his passport, a yellow legal pad with his handwriting that I could read, that was all there." As she watched the shredded pieces of the huge MD-11 jet arrive outside - none bigger than a table top, many smaller than a breadbox - she came to understand. Her resolve began to harden. "It wasn't supposed to happen this way," she said. "He was supposed to have a heart attack. All the men in his family died before the age of 55. "That I could have accepted." Weeks later, she brought her husband's remains home on a private jet, packed in dry ice. He was buried Jan. 11 - symbolically, 1-11-99. "When I buried my husband, I said: 'Ray, I'm going to get them all.' I didn't leave prayers. Nobody else can die this way. Nobody else." |
BURNING PASSION |
On 2nd September last year,
New York mother-of-three Lyn Romano was devastated when she lost her
husband in the Swissair MD11 air crash.
Unable at first to accept that such a thing could have happened to her, she eventually succumbed to the truth. But how and why had her husband died? Initial reports suggested an on-board fire and as Lyn probed deeper, with a determination that may well cost the worlds airlines in excess of $25 billion, her devastation turned to anger. Lyn wanted to know more about that fire. Polite enquiries proved fruitless- neither investigators nor authorities could - or would - help. So she branched out on her own, using the greatest research base in the world , the Internet. On the website of a newspaper based close to the crash area she found a report that wiring called Kapton was thought to have caused the fatal fire. Surfing the net for references to Kapton has brought her a vast array of reports and concerns. It has also put her in touch with experts and interested parties who will attest to a sorry tale of inaction and cover-up. Among other things she has found: - That the dangers of Kapton were known about as long ago as 1977 and increase with age as the Kapton gets ever more brittle That the FAA themselves wrote internal reports on these dangers in 1985 and 1993 - but took no action That all US Navy aircraft were stripped of Kapton because they were losing so many jets due to Kapton fires That Boeing instructed their wiring engineers to tell nobody of the devastating tests carried out in the late 1980's That British air accident investigators, in a secret internal memo, questioned why Kapton was ever allowed in an aircraft That Kapton wiring is suspected of causing the last 3 air disasters in North America, with the loss of over 600 lives That the MD11 is the 3rd aircraft lost by Swissair due to Kapton To Lyn her husband simply shouldn't have died and she's determined that nobody else should suffer as she has. She is lobbying to see Kapton wiring replaced in all commercial aircraft. This would quite simply be the biggest modification in aviation history, affecting 7000 of the worlds 12000 aircraft. And, at $3 million plus per aircraft, it would also be the most expensive. The decision rests with the FAA. Already the Agency has recommended its replacement but it would take a mandatory order to make the airlines spend the money. The FAA have promised a decision on that in two months and with the evidence amassed by this passionate, feisty, totally committed, half Italian New York mother, I wouldn't bet against it. |
HOW SAFE? |
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