Impact The Vagina Monologueswon a 1997 Obie
Award and was widely produced in many cities and
on college campuses. It inspired the V-Day move-
ment, which began with a celebrity-studded perfor-
mance on Valentine’s Day, 1998, generating $150,000
for local charities seeking to end violence against
women. Annual V-Day fund-raising celebrations
continued to spread worldwide, with performances
in more than eighty-one countries. By 2006, more
than $35 million had been raised for specific pro-
grams that called for increased awareness to combat
not only rape and physical abuse of women but also
genital mutilation, sex trafficking, forced marriage,
and public executions for adultery—hard truths En-
sler brought home to the consciousness of America.
Further Reading
Baumgardner, Jennifer. “When in Rome.. .”The Na-
tion273, no. 19 (December 2, 2002): 22-24.
Ensler, Eve.Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-
Obsessed World.New York: Villard, 2006.
Smith, Dinitia. “Today the Anatomy, Tomorrow the
World.”The New York Times, September 26, 1999,
p. 2.7.
Joanne McCarthy
See also Bosnia conflict; Homosexuality and gay
rights; Theater in the United States; Women’s rights.
ValuJet Flight 592 crash
The Event Atlanta-bound flight crashes near
Miami, killing 110
Date May 11, 1996
Place Some twenty miles west of Miami
International Airport in the Florida Everglades
When the DC-9-32 twin-engine aircraft hit the water and
mud of the swamp, a lengthy investigation was begun to
determine the cause of death of all aboard—two pilots, three
flight attendants, and 105 passengers. Additionally, con-
tributing factors were acknowledged, new safety regulations
issued, and a few people in the private and public sectors
lost their jobs. Suspended for a while, ValuJet returned to
the air, eventually under a new identity.
ValuJet was one of the discount airlines created dur-
ing the reconfiguration of the airline industry fol-
lowing the bankruptcy of such major carriers as Pan
American World Airways (Pan Am) and Eastern Air
Lines. Candalyn Kubeck, the first female chief pilot
to die in an air crash, had Richard Hazen as her
flight officer. Within minutes after takeoff, at eleven
thousand feet, the copilot requested clearance from
the control tower to return to Miami given the fire
and smoke conditions in the passenger cabin and
cockpit. As the plane was turning around, it plunged
into the swamp, breaking up as it hit the surface. The
Miami-Dade County Police Department began its
search and rescue operations in the dangerous alli-
gator- and snake-infested terrain, now covered with
flammable aviation fuel and debris, only to deter-
mine that there were no survivors.The Investigation The crash was described as a “sys-
tems accident” born of the confusion that lies within
the complex organizations through which an airline
system is managed. Once in a while, several bad, mi-
nor choices, none of them lethal by itself, come to-
gether in synergistic fashion and cause a tragedy
such as that of Flight 592.
The plane’s flight data recorder, which measured
eleven types of aircraft movement and control set-
tings, was recovered on May 13. The cockpit voice re-
corder was retrieved on May 15. Its tape had in-
cluded a brief, unidentified sound some six minutes
after takeoff and indicated that the crew had been
informed of smoke and fire conditions in the pas-
senger cabin. Eleven seconds thereafter, the plane
requested clearance to return to the airport but
crashed four minutes later.
The search for human remains and wreckage
ended on June 10. By then, 36 of the 110 crash vic-
tims had been identified. The wreckage confirmed
the smoke and fire on board. The investigation fo-
cused on the nature of the cargo stored in the
plane’s forward hold, just below and behind the
cockpit. Indeed, 119 chemical oxygen generators
had been loaded there. Ironically, these small fire-
bombs are in fact safety devices to provide passen-
gers with the vital gas when an aircraft loses pressur-
ization. The investigators concluded that a chemical
reaction inside one or more of these generators had
ignited and in turn set fire to at least one of three air-
craft tires also stored in the hold. It was not clear,
however, whether these conditions had compro-
mised the plane’s controls first or whether the con-
flagration had disabled the crew, now unable to fly
the plane.
The investigation also discovered that ValuJet,The Nineties in America ValuJet Flight 592 crash 891