Daschle Intervened with FAA on Behalf of Sleeping Pilot-Crony
NewsMax.com
Thursday Jan. 10, 2002; 11:18 p.m. EST
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle once demanded that a Federal Aviation Administration safety inspector be fired after a pilot-friend who allegedly took naps while behind the controls of his charter airplane failed a skills test administered by the inspector.
"It wasn't a pleasant experience," FAA inspector Grant Pearsoll told the New York Times about a 1985 incident where he failed to pass Daschle crony Murl Bellew on the safety inspection. Bellew threatened to contact his powerful friend, who was then in the House.
Less than three months later then-Rep. Daschle wrote to a senior FAA official demanding that Pearsoll by dismissed.
Daschle denied that efforts to get Pearsoll fired had anything to do with Bellew's complaint, claiming instead that he acted because many aviation people in South Dakota thought the safety inspector was excessively rude and unfit for the job.
But Bellew's failure to pass the pilot's test was just one of many instances suggesting that neither he nor the charter airline company he ran, B&L Aviation, was particularly safe.
One B&L passenger, South Dakota nurse Tammy Kirkland, told the New York Times in 1994 that she noticed Bellew had nodded off for several minutes while he was piloting her flight.
When Ms. Kirkland complained about the dozing Daschle crony, B&L pilot Edward Mellen assured her that she didn't have to worry because, "Murl's a light sleeper" who would awaken quickly at the sound of anything extraordinary.
The asleep-at-the-wheel Bellew complaint was just one of dozens that came to light after a B&L plane crashed in Minot, North Dakota in 1994, killing three government doctors and the pilot, Mr. Mellen.
But the accident followed a two year long lobbying effort undertaken by Sen. Daschle at Bellew's request to replace Forest Service safety inspections of B&L with FAA inspections.
At the time the Senator's wife Linda Daschle was the number two official at the FAA.
In a 1995 "60 Minutes" interview, the doctors' widows accused Senator Daschle of political influence peddling that led to their husbands' deaths. (Read the "60 Minutes" transcript featuring the widows' comments.)
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