Flying Lessons By Christine Negroni on April 29, 2021 at 7:53 AM
During the second half of the nineties, the patrician visage of Robert Talcott Francis dominated the news. And yet, when he died earlier this month at the age of 83, few outside of the aviation press published obituaries. This is not an obituary either, but my impressions of a thin slice of the man’s career when he was caught between feuding agencies and a multinational catastrophe.
In 1996, Francis, with his Oxford shirts and aristocratic manner, was the vice-chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board and as such he was the face of two high-casualty, high-profile airline crashes.