In a generally improving safety picture, maintenance-related crashes are a fraction of the total. There have been three in recent history.
A ValuJet DC-9 crashed in the Florida Everglades in May 1995, killing all 110 on board, because poorly supervised maintenance workers mishandled hazardous plane parts, causing a fire on board. In January 2000, an Alaska Airlines MD-80 crashed off the California coast because a tail assembly had been mislubricated, killing all 88 aboard. And in January 2003, a commuter plane crashed on takeoff in Charlotte, N.C., killing all 23 on board, partly because of a maintenance error in connecting the movable parts of the plane's tail to the control yoke in the cockpit.
The last crash of a big airliner in the United States was in November 2001, when an American Airlines flight leaving Kennedy International Airport for the Dominican Republic went down in Queens, killing 265. It is the longest period without a major jet crash in airline history.
