Who Killed The Redbird?

Are we to assume that the Clean Air Act doomed the redbird? That seems to be what the Sun is saying:

The New York City Transit Authority has agreed to pay $165,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the federal government alleging that it failed to repair air-conditioning systems on its subway cars in a timely manner.

The lawsuit, brought under the Clean Air Act, claimed that the city often did not fix leaking units within the required 30 days after discovering they were losing refrigerant. The lawsuit sought to minimize the release of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons that are found in the refrigerant.

The city also allegedly did not keep accurate logs detailing how much refrigerant it added to leaky air-conditioning units while conducting repairs, according to the lawsuit, which federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed in 2004.

The settlement was announced yesterday and the city admitted no wrongdoing, according to a copy of its terms.

The allegations did not extend to all cooling units on all subway cars in the city, but only to a class of subway cars that have since been removed from service. Known as “redbirds,” those subway cars were phased out beginning in 1998 and were no longer in use by the end of 2003, according to information on the MTA’s Web site.