Searchers find voice recorder at Philippines plane crash site
     MANILA, Philippines - Feb 14, 1998 08:48 a.m. EST -- Search
 teams have found the cockpit voice recorder of a DC-9 jet that
 crashed into a mountain ridge in the southern Philippines, killing
 all 104 people aboard, an official said Saturday.
     Jesus Dureza, chief of the rescue committee, said the recovery
 of the recorder Friday would allow the search at the crash site to
 wind up soon.
     The voice recorder includes conversations between the pilots and
 between the Cebu Pacific Air plane and the airport tower. The flight
 data recorder, recovered last week, has been sent to Canada for
 analysis.
     Dureza said only 14 bodies have been identified so far, nearly
 two weeks after the crash.
     He said 106 bags of body parts have been brought to Cagayan de
 Oro city from the crash site, about 28 miles from the city on the
 main southern island of Mindanao.
     The plane was traveling from Manila to Cagayan de Oro when it
 slammed into Mount Sumagaya on Feb. 2.
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        South Africa closes airports to stop illegal flights
     MAPUTO -- Feb 14, 1998 2:01 p.m. EST -- South African President
 Nelson Mandela said Saturday his government was closing down many
 airports in an effort to halt illegal flights to neighboring
 countries.
     The move comes after a recent incident in which a South African
 plane carrying building material for UNITA, the armed Angolan oppo-
 sition, was intercepted by the Angolan Airforce.
    "We have had a situation where we had a lot of airports in South
 Africa. We are closing many of them leaving only a few where we can
 guarantee a security of all flights and ensure that flights are
 properly checked," Mandela said in the Mozambican capital Maputo
 when a journalist questioned him over the incident.
     Mandela said he is conviced that in the near future "it will be
 possible for us to control flights from South Africa to all neigh-
 boring countries."
     The president said the South African government had identified
 some of the people operating illegal flights, "but it is always
 better, for security, not to mention them."
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     Critics: Too much emphasis on terrorism in air safety push
     WASHINGTON -- Feb 14, 1998 9:25 p.m. EST -- In the wake of the
 explosion of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, Vice President Al Gore an-
 nounced a major push to make air travel safer and also to fight
 terrorism.
     The goal: Slash the air fatality rate by 80 percent over the
 next 10 years.
     But more than a year later, some aviation experts say federal
 aviation officials are placing too much emphasis on fighting ter-
 rorism while not doing enough to make general air safety better.
     For instance, the federal government is spending $100 million
 to equip major U.S. airports with a high-tech machine that can
 detect virtually any type of bomb. The FAA also plans to double
 the number of bomb-sniffing dogs on duty in airports.
     But according to Michael Barr, director of the aviation safety
 program at the University of Southern California, "In the last 25
 worldwide fatal accidents, only one was caused by an explosive."
     And at the same time, while a fire in the cargo hold is believed
 to be the most likely cause of the crash of a ValuJet plane into the
 Florida Everglades in 1996, airlines still haven't widely installed
 the sort of smoke detectors that would have given the ValuJet plane's
 pilots an early warning.
     And it took a full 18 months after the TWA 800 crash before fed-
 eral authorities set up a commission to look into the kind of center
 fuel tank problems that investigators now think led to an explosion
 on that doomed flight.
     The lack of progress has left groups representing the families
 of crash victims unsatisfied.
     "Matters can be speeded up. Why do we have to wait four years,
 for instance, for smoke detectors [to be] installed in planes?" says
 Hans Ephraimson-Abt, whose group represents families of victims of
 the Korean Airlines Flight 007 disaster in 1983.
     Even critics of the aviation industry acknowledge that air tra-
 vel is still one of the safest forms of transportation. However,
 safety advances may have a hard time keeping up with increased air
 traffic.
     Industry experts say that even with today's low accident rate,
 increased traffic could mean that there will be an average of one
 crash every week by 2008.
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