It was headquartered in unincorporated Clayton County, Georgia[2] and operated regularly scheduled domestic and international flights in the Eastern United States and Canada[3] during the 1990s.

The crash of Flight 592 in 1996, which was caused by illegally and improperly stored hazardous materials on board, spelled doom for the airline.

It appeared on various aspects of ValuJet's operations, including aircraft, ticket counters, crew uniforms, advertisements, and merchandise sold by the airline.

It originally offered service from Atlanta to Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tampa with a single McDonnell Douglas DC-9-21 that previously belonged to Delta Air Lines.

Board members Maury Gallagher and Tim Flynn, the other co-founders, developed and ran WestAir before selling it to Mesa Airlines; former Continental Airlines and Flying Tigers President Lewis Jordan joined the carrier a short time later as president.

In February, the FAA ordered ValuJet to seek approval before adding any new aircraft or cities to their network, something the industry had not seen since deregulation in 1979.

This attempt at removing ValuJet's certification was "lost in the maze at FAA" according to NTSB Chairman Jim Hall.

[5] On May 11, 1996, ValuJet suffered its highest-profile accident when Flight 592, a DC-9 flying from Miami to Atlanta, crashed into the Florida Everglades; all 110 people on board died.

The crash was caused by an onboard fire triggered by full but expired chemical oxygen generators illegally stowed in the cargo hold without safety caps.

The resulting investigation revealed numerous systemic flaws, and ultimately faulted both SabreTech for storing the generators on the plane along with ValuJet for not supervising them.

Another plane was allowed to fly despite engine rust that went unnoticed during its refit; it caught fire a few months later and was completely destroyed.

After the large amount of negative publicity surrounding the Flight 592 incident, ValuJet suffered serious financial problems.

The merged company retained ValuJet's pre-1997 stock price history, but changed its name to AirTran Holdings.

Instead, AirTran kept a large cache of ValuJet memorabilia, including radio ads, locked in an Atlanta warehouse.

AirTran also opted not to make any major announcements on the crash's tenth anniversary out of respect for the victims' families.

At the time of its demise the fleet consisted of: ValuJet's main hub was in Atlanta and their focus cities were Orlando, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, and Washington Dulles.

[15] The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the engine failure was caused by a detectable crack in a compressor disk, on which a maintenance contractor had failed to perform a proper inspection and had kept poor records.