Overview: THE PROBLEM: "One of the main reasons [for the injuries and the deaths] is that aircraft manufacturers have concentrated on 'airworthiness' and ignored 'crash-worthiness.' Airplanes are primarily designed and built to withstand air pressure and turbulence, but tests are rarely conducted to find out what happens to a plane and the people in it when it hits the ground, a body of water, or an immovable structure, such as the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, D. C. The hundreds of people who have been killed this year in "survivable" airplane accidents have died not because death was unavoidable; they have died because the airplane they were traveling in was too flimsy, because their seats and seat belts did not hold, because fire was almost inevitable and because, in a fire, many materials used inside the airplane produced toxic fumes." The quote above is from: Edmund Cantilli, in an article which appeared in Newsday Magazine in December 1982. At the time Cantilli wrote this article he was Professor of Transportation Planning and Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. At the time he was and remains today Executive Director of the nonprofit Institute for Safety in Transportation,.