On hands and knees in the smoke-filled cabin of the Boeing 737, David H. Koch knew he had to get out. As fast as he could.
"I stood up and put my head in the smoke and started coughing violently," Koch recalls. "I could feel the smoke starting to overcome me."His USAir flight had hit a commuter plane while landing at Los Angeles International Airport, and the burning craft pinned below was generating thick, black smoke.
Seeing a sliver of light, Koch went for it. He was lucky; it was an exit. Twenty of the 23 fatalities on Koch's flight were attributed to smoke inhalation.
Koch believes most of the victims would have survived if they'd had smoke hoods, loose-fitting bags that are pulled over the head and provide clean air to breathe.
They can be had for the price of a good hat -- and they've gained a following in recent years.
One hood manufacturer saw sales through an in-flight catalog double this year, to 3,000. The Air Force bought 8,200 smoke hoods for transport aircraft this year, bringing its total to 34,200. Companies such as McDonald's Corp., General Electric Co. and Seagram Co. have purchased them for corporate jets.
The simplest smoke hoods are translucent bags fitted with filters at mouth level and made of advanced materials able to withstand hundreds of degrees of heat. The filter clears toxins from smoke, including deadly carbon monoxide. More elaborate hoods provide their own oxygen.
Federal regulators have declined to require smoke hoods on airliners, but some travelers are making their own choices.
"I carry one in my briefcase now," says Koch, executive vice president of oil and gas producer Koch Industries, the nation's second-largest private company. The 1991 collision and fire made him a believer.
Whether to install smoke hoods on commercial aircraft has been an off-and-on issue for about 30 years. The chief concern of the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency responsible for U.S. air safety, is that passengers taking time to don the hoods would be slower to evacuate a burning plane.
"What you want to do is get people out of the airplane as quickly as possible," says Peggy Gilligan, the FAA's deputy associate administrator for regulation and certification. Smoke hoods, she says, might give passengers a "false sense of protection."
Smoke-hood proponents dispute that contention.
"The bottom line is money," says Mary Schiavo, an air safety advocate and former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA. "We don't have them because of the money on the part of the airlines."
Five years ago, the FAA rejected a proposal that it mandate smoke hoods on all commercial airliners.