Free Republic

On May 11, 1996, 105 passengers boarded a ValuJet flight in Miami, bound for Atlanta. They never made it. Shortly after takeoff, a small explosion in the airtight cargo hold developed into a fire, which should have burned out quickly, but didn’t. The 27-year-old plane’s crew of five, and all 105 passengers, were killed as the plane plummeted into the Everglades. Many chalked this up to the dangers of plane travel and the poor maintenance record of ValuJet, which, as a budget carrier, certainly gave plausible grounds for the argument… but it wasn’t a lack of maintenance that caused this...

MIAMI — Robert Woodus III never met his father, who died eight months before his birth in 1996. But on Wednesday the 14-year-old eighth-grader stood near the place his father died, in a watery Everglades prairie where ValuJet Flight 592 plunged to earth in a fiery crash just north of U.S. 41. "I was thinking about this place, and what happened before I was born," said Woodus. His father, Robert Woodus Jr., was one of 110 people who died in what remains Florida's deadliest air crash.