30 years after Air Florida crash, skies safer than ever

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/30-years-after-air-florida-crash-skies-safer-than-ever/2012/01/05/gIQAW0GwtP_story_1.html

Thirty years later, few of the 26,000 passengers who take off from National on a typical day remember the details of the Flight 90 crash. But the people flying their planes do.

“Within the air crew world, this is a well-known accident,” said Jim Hookey, the resident expert on jet engines at the NTSB.

It was not the weight of the ice, the wait to takeoff or the slush on the runway that caused the plane to crash. For reasons no one will ever know, two pilots with little experience in winter weather failed to turn on heating systems that keep the idling jet engines warm.

Without that heat, something — almost certainly ice — clogged engine openings that are essential to determining how much thrust those engines are generating. As a result, the cockpit instruments told the pilots that the engines were generating far more power than they really were.

Because of those bad readings, when the plane failed to gain altitude, the pilots didn’t realize that throwing the throttle open would give them more lift.

“Up to about eight or 10 seconds before they hit the bridge, if they had just pushed the throttle [wide open], they probably would have buzzed the bridge, but they would have made it,” Hookey said.

That lesson, he said, has been learned throughout the industry.

“Crews now are not hesitant to jam the throttle to save the plane,” Hookey said. “There’s probably been a lot of airplanes that have been saved because of the errors that these guys made.”

* * *

Conversation in the cockpit as Air Florida struggles to get airborne:

Pilot: “Come on forward . . . forward, just barely climb. . . . Stalling, we’re falling!”

Co-pilot: “Larry, we’re going down, Larry . . .”

Pilot: “I know it.”

[Sound of impact.]