As we were putting the finishing touches on this issue of AeroSafety World, Amtrak announced that it has named Ken Hylander, former chairman of the Flight Safety Foundation Board of Governors and a long-time executive at Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines and United Airlines, as executive vice president and chief safety officer.
For those of you outside North America who may not be familiar with it, the National Railroad Passenger Corp., doing business as Amtrak, is a government-owned, for-profit corporation that operates intercity passenger rail service to more than 500 destinations in the United States and three Canadian provinces, and carries about 30 million passengers a year. It suffered a high-profile fatal accident in mid-December when an Amtrak train that the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said was travelling 78 mph in an area with a posted 30-mph speed limit derailed from a highway overpass near DuPont, Washington. Three passengers were killed.
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