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A memorial was held Tuesday to honor the lives lost 25 years ago when ValuJet Flight 592 went down in the Florida Everglades killing all 110 people on board.
Retired police divers and firefighters gathered with other first responders to remember the victims and shed tears over what they witnessed that day.
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Joyce Simonton was one of the passengers. Her granddaughter, Kristen Grissom, was at her Georgia home when her father delivered the devastating news. She was seven years old.
“Him (father) sitting me down in her front yard on her steps, and him explaining to me that my grandmother…had been on this flight, and explaining to me that ‘granny’ wasn’t coming back,” Grissom told NBC 6 during a Zoom interview.
the fact is, though, your drive to the airport is many, many more times dangerous than the actual flight. and there is a reason for that. the business of making planes, carrying passengers and regulating the industry for all the shortcomings we ve seen is very much a tight-knit community with a long tradition of learning from past mistakes, or like this anticipating them. it is requiring all aircraft operations in the u.s. be ready for it with the right transmitting equipment by the year 2020, and it s precisely this sort of system that could have made following 370 so much easier and like many innovations it evolved from bitter lessons learned the hard way. randi kaye reports. reporter: valujet flight 592 from miami to atlanta, the day before mother s day 1996, the pilots hear a loud boom six minutes into the flight.
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reporter: valujet flight 592 from miami to atlanta, the day before mother s day 1996, the pilots hear a loud boom six minutes in to the flight. return to miami. what kind of problem? smoke in the cabin. the pilots head to the nearest airport. meanwhile, passengers are yelling about a fire. the aircraft rolls on its side and then crashes nose nose first in to the florida everglades killing all 110 people on board. the ntsb determined the fire began in a cargo compartment. if we have fire detection system the crew would have been afforded more time to get the plane on the ground. reporter: the faa took those words to heart and as a result revised standards for cargo requiring smoke detectors and automatic fire extinguishers in cargo holds. we are on a mayday. we re going down.
the job. as you know yesterday s mission was aborted after six hours. today s dive is expected to go around the clock. there are new developments on that front, new developments, as well, with that oily substance recovered from the ocean surface and we ll also tell you about a tracking system for planes that s being rolled out over the next six years that may have changed everything about that happened to flight 370. the question is why six years from now will it be rolled out? what is taking so long. first michael holmes in perth on today s search efforts. what s the latest, michael? reporter: anderson, good morning from perth. the bluefin-21 down doing its work at the moment. by our calculations it is almost exactly halfway through the ocean floor segment of that. as we know, it takes two hours to get down and 16 hours on the bottom and two hours to get up and then they download the data. also, planes and ships out there again today. we had been told that that phase of things looki