Anglonautes > English vocabulary / words > Transports > Aviation > Plane

A look at some of the world's deadliest air disasters:

June 30, 2009: Yemenia Airbus 310 enroute to the Comoros Islands crashes in the Indian Ocean. 153 people were on board.

June 1, 2009: Air France Airbus A330 runs into thunderstorms over the Atlantic after leaving Brazil and disappears. 228 people on board.

Feb. 19, 2003: Iranian Revolutionary Guard military plane crashes into a mountain. 275 dead.

May 25, 2002: China Airlines Boeing 747 breaks apart midair and crashes into the Taiwan Strait. 225 dead.

Nov. 12, 2001: American Airlines Airbus A300 crashes after takeoff from JFK Airport into the New York City borough of Queens. 265 dead, including people on the ground.

Oct. 31, 1999: EgyptAir Boeing 767 crashes off Nantucket; the NTSB blames actions by the co-pilot. 217 dead.

Feb. 16, 1998: China Airlines Airbus A300 crashes on landing at airport in Taipei, Taiwan. 203 dead.

Sept. 26, 1997: Garuda Indonesia Airbus A300 crashes near airport in Medan, Indonesia. 234 dead.

Aug. 6, 1997: Korean Air Boeing 747-300 crashes on landing in Guam. 228 dead.

Nov. 12, 1996: Saudi Boeing 747 collides with Kazakh cargo plane near New Delhi. 349 dead.

July 17, 1996: TWA Boeing 747 explodes and crashes into the Atlantic off Long Island, New York. 230 dead.

April 26, 1994: China Airlines Airbus A300 crashes on landing at Nagoya Airport in Japan. 264 dead.

Dec. 12, 1985: Arrow Air DC-8 crashes after takeoff from Newfoundland, Canada. 256 dead.

Aug. 12, 1985: Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 crashes into a mountainside after losing part of its tail fin. 520 dead in the world's worst single-plane disaster.

Aug. 19, 1980: Saudi Tristar makes emergency landing in Riyadh and bursts into flames. 301 dead.

May 25, 1979: American Airlines DC-10 crashes after takeoff from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. 275 dead.

Jan. 1, 1978: Air India 747 crashes into the ocean after takeoff from Mumbai. 213 dead.

March 27, 1977: KLM 474, Pan American 747 collide on runway in Tenerife, Canary Islands. 583 dead in world's worst airline disaster.

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Source: World Almanac, Associated Press.

A Look at World's Deadliest Air Disasters,
NYT,
30.6.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/30/
world/AP-Plane-Disasters-Glance.html

Captain Testifies

at Flight 1549 Hearing

June 10, 2009
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
and LIZ ROBBINS

WASHINGTON — When Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III spoke to the 150 passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 on the La Guardia runway on the afternoon of Jan. 15, he remarked what a nice day it was to fly. And soon after they took off, he remarked to his co-pilot, Jeffrey B. Skiles, “What a view of the Hudson today.”

In retrospect, those words, released in the full transcript from the air traffic control of the fateful flight during Tuesday’s hearings by the National Transportation Safety Board, were prophetic.

The aircraft, an A320 Airbus, struck Canada geese at 2,700 feet, within 1 minute 37 seconds after takeoff, and Captain Sullenberger told the air traffic controller that “we lost thrust in both engines.”

Despite initiating the engine’s restart program immediately and examining his options for landing at a nearby airport, Captain Sullenberger was forced a few minutes later to issue the now familiar calm, clipped words signaling that he was ditching the plane in the river: “We’re going to be in the Hudson.”

Captain Sullenberger testified Tuesday morning as the first witness at the hearings, recounting what happened when, determining that he could not land at a nearby airport, he instead glided the plane safely into the river and enabled all 155 passengers and crew to survive.

“The only option remaining in the metropolitan area that was long enough, wide enough and smooth enough to land was the Hudson River,” he said.

Captain Sullenberger said that with no simulation training for a water ditching, he used his experience of more than 40 years of flying and common sense to derive a successful outcome.

He revealed that he knew the Hudson would be the best — and only — option because he recalled the support available from the heavy boat traffic he viewed from having visited the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on a day off in New York City.

Since the accident, Captain Sullenberger, 58, a gray-haired man with nearly 30 years of experience at the airline, has become a symbol of stoic calm and courage in the face of an emergency. The transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, also released on Tuesday, showed that Captain Sullenberger had a human side.

The flight had gone smoothly until the plane hit the birds, with a few exceptions. One was the bulletproof cockpit door, which was apparently sticky. Captain Sullenberger complained soon after the recording began, “oh, that # door again.” (The transcript uses the “#” sign to denote expletives.)

“What’s wrong?” asked the first officer, Mr. Skiles.

“Have to slam it pretty hard,” Captain Sullenberger said.

A little more than five minutes after takeoff, Captain Sullenberger had something different to tell his first officer. Upon landing in the Hudson, Captain Sullenberger said he recalled turning to Mr. Skiles and saying, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought the entry would be.”

Robert L. Sumwalt, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, was the chairman of the Board of Inquiry, moderating the hearings. He asked Captain Sullenberger one crucial question:

“This event turned out differently than a lot of the situations the board has looked at,” Mr. Sumwalt said. “What made the critical difference in this event? How did this event turn out so well?”

Without missing a beat, Captain Sullenberger responded: “I don’t think it was one thing, it was many things. We had a highly experienced, well-trained crew. The first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, and I worked together well as a team and we solved each problem as it presented itself to us.”

According to the transportation safety board, the impact with the birds came at a spot about 4.5 miles from the approach end of Runway 22 at La Guardia. Runway 24 at Teterboro, N.J., where the crew briefly considered diverting, was 9.5 miles away. The spot where the plane touched down in the Hudson was 8.5 miles away. But according to Mr. Sumwalt, it was not clear if the crew had sufficient control over other parts of the plane — like the landing gear brakes — to manage a landing on a runway.

Captain Sullenberger said he had never experienced a bird strike like the one on Jan. 15, where there were so many large birds that were “filling the entire windscreen.”

On Monday, Mr. Sumwalt said engineers were trying new technologies to scare away birds in flight, including using landing lights as strobe lights. He said turning the landing lights into strobe lights could make a plane, closing in on the birds at more than 100 miles an hour, more conspicuous to them. But he said that that was only one solution that should be investigated and would probably be discussed during the three-day hearings.

“Maybe there’s some other technology out there, a radar that some innovative company can come up with to zap the birds out of the way,” Mr. Sumwalt said. Some pilots believe that birds try to avoid emissions from the planes’ on-board weather radar, he said, and “we need to find out, is that an urban legend or is there some truth to that?”

“We need to be innovative when we’re looking for solutions here,” he said.

The happy outcome in Flight 1549’s splashdown into the frigid Hudson involved not only the skill of the crew, but also a lot of luck, experts say: In the last 20 years, researchers counted 229 people killed and 210 aircraft destroyed as a result of bird strikes.

In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration already has an extensive program for what it calls “wildlife hazard mitigation,” but it seems ill suited to the problem that faced the US Airways flight, which struck geese five miles from the runway — too far for the New York airports to take action — at an altitude of 2,900 feet — too high for radars being installed around the country to detect birds.

Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution announced Monday that isotopic analysis of the goose remains found in Flight 1549’s two engines showed that habitat destruction would be impractical because the birds were migratory and not part of the population that has settled permanently in the New York area.

They were probably in flight that morning because snow had covered the grass where they usually graze, said Peter P. Marra, a research wildlife biologist based at the National Zoo in Washington, and they were looking for open feeding grounds. Native populations can be displaced by a few miles to keep them away from runways, but biologists do not want to disrupt birds that migrate.

Laura J. Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said that biologists follow the patterns of resident birds and try to dissuade them from living where they would be a problem. But, she added, “what kind of program can you have for migratory birds?”

Disrupting habitats close to airports that are attractive to birds, like ponds, can be helpful for discouraging both resident and migratory birds, she said.

The Smithsonian determined that the geese involved in Flight 1549 were migratory by looking at the ratio between two kinds of hydrogen in their feathers. That ratio reflects the one found in grasses that the birds ate while they grew their feathers after the annual molt. A type of hydrogen called deuterium, which was low in this case, is more prevalent in grasses in latitudes like New York’s than in northern Canada.

Another area to be covered in the three days of safety board hearings is how engine standards are set. There is a rule for how big a bird an engine must be able to take in and spit out while continuing to produce thrust, and another for the maximum size it must be able to take in without breaking up and throwing off dangerous shrapnel. The hearings will look into whether engines can be built to withstand birds as big as the Canada goose. Mr. Sumwalt said the answer was probably not.

Ms. Brown said engine standards had to be balanced with other concerns like fuel economy and thrust level.

Captain Testifies at Flight 1549 Hearing, NYT, 10.6.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/
nyregion/10usair.html

A Glance at Lightning Strikes

in Civil Aviation

June 1, 2009
Filed at 2:34 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some details about lightning strikes in civil aviation:

--Lightning strikes on passenger airliners occur daily, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere and the equatorial belt where massive thunderstorms are frequent throughout the year.

--Each large passenger jet -- such as the Airbus A330 -- is struck by lightning about once every three years on average, according to international aviation incident statistics.

--Regional aircraft are hit about once a year because they cruise at much lower altitudes where there's a greater possibility of strikes.

--With approximately 25,000 commercial jets in service with the world's airlines, there are statistically about three dozen lightning strikes occur each day.

--The overwhelming majority of such incidents ends with no damage or only superficial damage to the airframe, such as small dents.

--Most airliners -- such as the A330 -- are built mainly of aluminum, which is very good at dissipating the energy contained in a lightning bolt, which can be in excess of 300,000 amps.

--Composite components on some newer models are not as good at shedding electrical energy and are particularly prone to damage from lightning strikes.

--There have been only a handful of accidents in the past 50 years in which lightning may have played a contributory role.

--The deadliest occurred on Dec. 8, 1963, when lightning ignited the vapors in the fuel tanks of a Pan American World Airways Boeing 707 flying over Maryland. All 81 people on board died. Immediately after, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered that all commercial airliners be equipped with electrical discharge wicks.

A Glance at Lightning Strikes in Civil Aviation, NYT, 1.6.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/01/world/
AP-Brazil-Plane-Lightning-Strikes.html

Fiery Plane Crash

in Upstate NY Kills 50

February 13, 2009
Filed at 8:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CLARENCE, N.Y. (AP) -- A Continental commuter plane coming in for a landing nose-dived into a house in suburban Buffalo, sparking a fiery explosion that killed all 49 people aboard and a person in the home. It was the nation's first fatal crash of a commercial airliner in 2 1/2 years.

Witnesses heard the twin turboprop aircraft sputtering before it went down in light snow and fog around 10:20 p.m. Thursday about five miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport. Continental Connection Flight 3407 from Newark, N.J., came in squarely through the roof of the house, its tail section visible through flames shooting at least 50 feet high.

''The whole sky was lit up orange,'' said Bob Dworak, who lives less than a mile away. ''All the sudden, there was a big bang, and the house shook.''

Two others in the house escaped with minor injuries. The plane was carrying a four-member crew and an off-duty pilot. Among the 44 passengers killed was a woman whose husband died in the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

By morning, with the rubble still smoking, the task of retrieving remains had not yet begun.

Erie County Emergency Coordinator David Bissonette said it appeared the plane ''dove directly on top of the house.''

''It was a direct hit,'' Bissonette said. ''It's remarkable that it only took one house. As devastating as that is, it could have wiped out the entire neighborhood.''

President Barack Obama voiced condolences, saying ''our hearts go out to the families and friends who lost loved ones.''

No mayday call came from the pilot before the crash, according to a recording of air traffic control's radio messages captured by the Web site LiveATC.net. Neither the controller nor the pilot showed concern that anything was out of the ordinary as the airplane was asked to fly at 2,300 feet.

At the time of the last radio contact, the controller said the plane was three miles from a radio beacon that stands about four miles northeast of the airport. The controller told the crew to turn the plane left to intercept a radio signal that would guide it to Runway 23. A female pilot aboard the plane calmly repeated the instructions back correctly.

A minute later, the controller tried to contact the plane but heard no response. After a pause, he tried to contact the plane again.

Eventually he told an unidentified listener to contact authorities on the ground in the Clarence area.

After the crash, at least two pilots were heard on air traffic control messages saying they had been picking up ice on their wings.

''We've been getting ice since 20 miles south of the airport,'' one said.

The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team of investigators to Buffalo. The Department of Homeland Security said there was no indication of terrorism.

While residents of the neighborhood were used to planes rumbling overhead, witnesses said it sounded louder than usual, sputtered and made odd noises.

David Luce said he and his wife were working on their computers when they heard the plane come in low.

''It didn't sound normal,'' he said. ''We heard it for a few seconds, then it stopped, then a couple of seconds later was this tremendous explosion.''

Dworak drove to the site, and ''all we were seeing was 50 to 100 foot flames and a pile of rubble on the ground. It looked like the house just got destroyed the instant it got hit.''

One person in the home was killed, and two others inside, Karen Wielinski, 57, and her 22-year-old daughter, Jill, were able to escape with minor injuries. Twelve homes were evacuated.

The plane was carrying 5,000 pounds of fuel and apparently exploded on impact, Erie County Executive Chris Collins said.

Firefighters got as close to the plane as they could, he said. ''They were shouting out to see if there were any survivors on the plane. Truly a very heroic effort, but there were no survivors.''

It was the first fatal crash of a commercial airliner in the United States since Aug. 27, 2006, when 49 people were killed after a Comair jetliner took off from a Lexington, Ky., runway that was too short.

The 74-seat Q400 Bombardier aircraft was operated by Manassas, Va.-based Colgan Air.

About 30 relatives and others who arrived at the airport in the overnight hours were escorted into a private area and then taken by bus to a senior citizens center in the neighboring town of Cheektowaga, where counselors and representatives from Continental waited to help.

''At this time, the full resources of Colgan Air's accident response team are being mobilized and will be devoted to cooperating with all authorities responding to the accident and to contacting family members and providing assistance to them,'' the statement said.

''Continental extends its deepest sympathy to the family members and loved ones of those involved in this accident,'' Continental chairman and CEO Larry Kellner said in a statement. ''Our thoughts and prayers are with all of the family members and loved ones of those involved in the flight 3407 tragedy.''

Chris Kausner, believing his sister was on the plane, rushed to a hastily established command center after calling his vacationing mother in Florida to break the news.

''To tell you the truth, I heard my mother make a noise on the phone that I've never heard before. So not good, not good,'' he told reporters.

The 9/11 widow on board was identified as Beverly Eckert. She was heading to Buffalo for a celebration of what would have been her husband's 58th birthday, said Mary Fetchet, a 9/11 family activist.

Airline officials identified the crew as Capt. Marvin Renslow, pilot; first officer Rebecca Shaw and flight attendants Matilda Quintero and Donna Prisco. The off-duty crew member was Capt. Joseph Zuffoletto.

Clarence is a growing eastern suburb of Buffalo, largely residential but with rural stretches. The crash site is a street of closely spaced, older, single-family homes that back up to a wooded area.

The crash came less than a month after a US Airways pilot guided his crippled plane to a landing in the Hudson River off Manhattan, saving the lives of all 155 people aboard. Birds had apparently disabled both its engines.

On Dec. 20, a Continental Airlines plane veered off a runway and slid into a snowy field at the Denver airport, injuring 38 people.

Continental's release said relatives and friends of those on Flight 3407 who wanted to give or receive information about those on board could telephone a special family assistance number, 1-800-621-3263.

------

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, Linda Franklin in Dallas, Daniel Yee in Atlanta, Ron Powers in Washington, and Cristian Salazar and Jennifer Peltz in New York.

------

On the Net:

Audio of air traffic control: http://sn.im/bt1z3

Fiery Plane Crash in Upstate NY Kills 50, NYT, 13.2.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/02/13/us/AP-Plane-Into-Home.html

Cockpit Tape

Reveals Engine Loss

and a ‘Mayday’

January 19, 2009
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
and AL BAKER

The cockpit voice recording from the plane that landed in the Hudson River on Thursday captured both the sound of an impact on the US Airways jet, presumably by birds, and the efforts of a crew that was going through what a senior investigator called a “very calm, collected exercise,” even though they were gliding lower and had no way to reach a runway.

The plane lost thrust in both engines soon after takeoff, and never reached an altitude above 3,200 feet, officials of the National Transportation Safety Board said on Sunday.

“About 90 seconds after takeoff, the captain remarks about birds,” said Kathryn O. Higgins, one of the agency’s five board members, in characterizing what could be heard on the cockpit voice recording. The recording was played in the board’s laboratory in Washington on Sunday and described to Ms. Higgins, who has been assigned to the scene. “One second later, the cockpit voice recorder recorded the sound of thumps and a rapid decrease in engine sounds,” she said.

The recorder helped illustrate how the crew departed from the usual script once they realized their dire circumstances.

Usually, one pilot flies the plane and the other works the radios, but in this case, it was Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III doing both, while the first officer, Jeffrey B. Skiles, rushed to try to accomplish a “restart” checklist. But even if the engines could have been restarted, he had very little time: Flight 1549 ditched into the river three and a half minutes after the engines lost power.

The voice recorder also captured the captain declaring “Mayday,” but the tape of air-to-ground communications did not, possibly because he said the word before he pressed the button on the microphone that would begin a radio transmission. Still, Ms. Higgins said, when she listened to that tape, “It was a very routine conversation, that’s how I would characterize it. I was more nervous than they appeared to be, listening to it.”

Typically, the full air-to-ground tape is released by the Federal Aviation Administration within weeks of an incident; the safety board generally releases a transcript of cockpit voice recordings in a few months.

On first examination, the two recorders, which were recovered from the plane early Sunday, confirmed details given by the cockpit crew in interviews, she said.

Robert Benzon, the safety board investigator in charge, described the cockpit conversation as calm and collected. He said that an initial look at the right engine, the only one still attached to the plane, showed a few dents on the cowling but not much damage to the fan blades at the front. But foreign objects can sometimes do greater damage deeper inside the engine, he said.

As the plane was hauled out of the water late Saturday in Battery Park City, where it had been moored, the right engine showed debris that “looked like grunge to me,” he said, but that might have been mud or seaweed, rather than bird remains.

The search for the left engine, which is believed to be in the general area of where the plane landed, has been delayed by ice in the river. Ms. Higgins said that New York Police Department searchers had a “positive hit” on an object on the river bottom that was the right size to be an engine, and was in a plausible spot, but that using better sonar or a remote-controlled camera would probably have to wait because of heavy ice. They marked the spot for exploration, she said.

The police, she said, were “quite familiar with the bottom out there,” and had not seen this object before. The police, however, seemed less certain that the “hit” was the engine.

Progress on examining the plane has been slow because the deck of the barge where it is being kept is slippery with ice and fuel, Mr. Benzon said. The fuel tank in the right wing has a small leak, and investigators and salvagers decided to empty it before moving the barge to a Jersey City marina, where it was to be inspected by investigators.

The now-familiar images of passengers standing on the wings, waiting for boats to rescue them, raised the question of whether the plane, an Airbus A320, carried enough life rafts. Mr. Benzon said that there was room for all the passengers on the emergency slides, which in a water landing become rafts.

Ms. Higgins said one reason everyone survived was that the plane carried “very senior flight attendants.” All were in their 50s, according to US Airways. “This is a testament to experienced women doing their jobs, because they were, and it worked,” said Ms. Higgins, who has worked for several federal agencies since 1969.

On Sunday night, the US Airways plane gleamed under the lights as it rested on the barge, before it left Battery Park City. The windows from the wing exits were missing, the right front door hung askew and a deflated slide from a rear door trailed from the plane’s body. The heavy hum of a tugboat’s diesel engine was a reminder that this was an accident scene, not a surreal sculpture. Ms. Higgins, asked if the plane would ever fly again, said, “Only in the movies.”

Cockpit Tape Reveals Engine Loss and a ‘Mayday’, NYT, 19.1.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/
nyregion/19plane.html

1549 to Tower:

‘We’re Gonna End Up

in the Hudson’

January 18, 2009
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By MATTHEW L. WALD and AL BAKER

Just seconds after the first officer of US Airways Flight 1549, leaving La Guardia Airport and bound for Charlotte, N.C., pointed the nose of his jet into the sky, he noticed that there were birds on the right side — “in a perfect line formation.”

The plane’s captain, who had been busy watching the cockpit instruments, managing the radios and looking at charts, then looked up.

The windscreen, he told investigators, was filled with birds. The plane, at roughly 3,000 feet, was going at least 250 miles an hour. The captain’s first instinct, he said, was to duck.

Seconds later, flight attendants aboard the plane reported hearing a thud or a thump — a sound they had never heard before. The engines went quiet. And the plane’s captain, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, smelled something.

“Burning birds,” he told investigators.

Since Flight 1549 landed — safely but spectacularly — in the Hudson River on Thursday, no one had heard the accounts of the two pilots who had helped keep 153 other people alive. On Saturday night, Kathryn O. Higgins of the National Transportation Safety Board gave the first version of what the pilots saw, said and did in the course of executing one of the more remarkable safe endings in American aviation history.

The account offered by the safety agency — based on interviews conducted Saturday with the plane’s crew — had numerous startling elements, not the least of which was the fact that Captain Sullenberger, who has been hailed by the mayor and the president for his skill and bravery, was not at the controls at takeoff. Instead, the plane’s first officer, 49-year-old Jeffrey B. Skiles, was in control; a 23-year veteran of the airline, he had just 35 hours of flying time in this particular kind of craft, the Airbus A320.

But as soon as the plane encountered the birds and the engines quit nearly simultaneously, Captain Sullenberger, 58, took over.

“My aircraft,” he announced to his first officer, using the standard phrasing and protocol drilled into airline crews.

“Your aircraft,” Mr. Skiles responded.

With little thrust, and with the plane’s airspeed falling sharply, Captain Sullenberger lowered the nose to keep his plane from falling out of the sky. And he set his co-pilot to work at moving through a three-page checklist of procedures for restarting both the engines.

The checklist, investigators said, is intended for planes that are in distress at much higher altitudes — like 35,000 feet. At such heights, of course, there is more time to restart.

As the co-pilot worked desperately on the checklist, the crew radioed the air traffic controller, who had just cleared them to climb to 15,000 feet.

They discussed returning to La Guardia, but the plane was “too low, too slow,” and besides, there were “too many buildings, too populated an area.”

“We’re unable, we may end up in the Hudson,” one of them, probably Mr. Skiles, said to the controller, according to the safety agency.

The two veteran flight attendants who had heard the thump or thud told investigators that after the engines failed, the cabin was silent.

“It was like being in a library,” Ms. Higgins said.

The pilots saw Teterboro Airport ahead across the Hudson, and they considered going there, but Captain Sullenberger, who is also licensed as a glider pilot, had the same problem: too many miles and not enough power, in the form of altitude or engine thrust.

The crew worried that in such a populated area, the outcome could be “catastrophic,” the safety agency said.

One of the two pilots, probably the co-pilot, told the controller: “We can’t do it. We’re gonna end up in the Hudson.”

“That is the last communiqué of the flight,” Ms. Higgins said.

But it was not the end of the crew’s task. Captain Sullenberger saw a boat on the river, and remembered from his training that if a plane has to ditch, it should be done near a vessel.

The crew lowered the flaps, movable devices on the wing that allow the plane to fly more slowly, now essential because the length of their “runway” was not an issue but force at impact certainly would be.

The flaps run on hydraulic power, and the hydraulics were supposed to run off the now bird-stuffed engines. But the Airbus A320 has a “ram air turbine,” essentially a little propeller that drops down into the wind automatically in certain conditions and produces electricity; it may have provided the energy to allow the crew to lower the flaps.

Soon there was a command from the cockpit to the cabin to “brace.” To the two flight attendants in front, it felt like a hard landing; to the flight attendant in the rear, it felt much harder; items in the galley came loose and were thrown around the plane.

In the water, the electricity died. One of the pilots opened the cockpit door and ordered, “Evacuate,” but the flight attendants and passengers were already doing so.

One overeager passenger rushed to the back of the plane and tried to open the rear door, even though it was already at least partly under water. She got it open a crack and water started flowing in, but the flight attendant there got her pointed to the front.

The flight attendant in the rear — not identified on Saturday — was soon in water up to her chest. She grabbed a life preserver and pushed forward, exited the plane and got into a raft, and felt woozy. She had a gash in one leg all the way into the muscle, but the water was so cold she was too numb to feel it.

Early indications, as described by the safety agency, were that the cockpit and cabin crews got through an emergency “by the book,” but it was an event that exists almost entirely in books alone; big planes seldom come down in water in a controlled way.

Just how the plane came down in the Hudson emerged on Saturday in videos kept or obtained by local and federal authorities. They were released, along with recordings of the first 911 calls.

In the briefing on Saturday night, Ms. Higgins said investigators on the Hudson believed they had identified the location of the one engine that had been torn off the plane. They hoped to confirm that in the coming hours and eventually retrieve it.

Late Saturday night, crews at Battery Park City had rigged the plane — weighing an estimated one million pounds — and lifted it out of the Hudson. They planned to load it onto a barge for investigators.

The black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder that will serve as electronic witnesses to the event, had been removed from the plane by 1 a.m. on Sunday to be taken to Washington, transportation officials said.

Jason Grant and Mick Meenan

contributed reporting.

1549 to Tower: ‘We’re Gonna End Up in the Hudson’, NYT, 18.1.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/nyregion/18plane.html

Bird Hazard

Is Persistent for Planes

January 17, 2009
The New York Times
By MICHELINE MAYNARD

Federal investigators are pursuing early indications that the US Airways jet that crash-landed in the Hudson River was struck by geese shortly after taking off — a type of collision that has caused problems for pilots since soon after the first airplane flight.

The accident involving the jet, which took off from La Guardia Airport, would be unusual, though, because both of the plane’s engines appeared to have been damaged by birds, aviation experts said on Thursday.

Representatives from CFM International, which produced the engines on the US Airways jet that made a midafternoon splash landing in the Hudson, have been asked to participate in the investigation of the incident, a spokeswoman for the company said.

Some of the evidence that investigators might normally look for, in the form of bird remains, might have washed away by now, however, given that the plane spent the night moored on the river. But once the plane has been lifted out of the river and moved indoors, the investigators will be able to disassemble the engines and study them for damage.

Since 2000, at least 486 commercial aircraft have collided with birds, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Of those incidents, 166 led to emergency landings and 66 resulted in aborted takeoffs.

Canada geese, a frequent visitor to golf courses and open spaces in the metropolitan New York area during the winter, pose a particular danger to planes because of their size. The impact of a 12 pound bird hitting a plane traveling at 150 miles per hour is equal to that of a 1,000 pound weight dropped from a height of 10 feet, according to experts on bird strikes.

The earliest known fatal airplane crash involving a bird took place in 1912, nine years after the first flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C. That plane crashed into the surf off Long Beach, Calif., pinning its pilot under the wreckage.

The most deadly crash involving a bird strike occurred in 1962, when 62 people were killed on an Eastern Air Lines propeller plane that crashed upon takeoff from Boston. That plane collided with a flock of starlings, sucking the birds into three of its four engines, causing the plane to stall and plunge into Boston Harbor.

In the New York area, the most recent incident took place at Kennedy Airport in December 2006, when a great blue heron was drawn into the engine of a Boeing 767 jet shortly after takeoff. The plane returned to the airport, and passengers were put on another flight.

There was another incident at La Guardia as recently as 2003, when an American Airlines Fokker 100 plane hit a flock of geese upon takeoff, causing the right engine to fail. The flight was diverted to J.F.K.

All commercial airplane engines are required to pass a “bird strike” test before they can be certified for use. Engine manufacturers, including CFM International, which produced the engines on the US Airways Airbus A320 involved in Thursday’s sudden landing, test the engines physically and through computer simulation.

In the physical tests, the engines are revved to full power inside a test facility and absorb various kinds of birds, from those the size of sparrows to those the size of herons, one at a time. (The birds are already dead.) The engines also ingest multiple birds meant to simulate a collision with a flock, said Matthew Perra, a spokesman for the engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney.

To pass the test, engines must keep operating after the collision, maintaining enough power to take off, fly around the airport and land the plane safely, he said. That is because a jet with two engines has to be able to take off on 50 percent power.

Engines are tested one at a time, so manufacturers cannot measure what would happen if a flock of birds hit both engines at once. However, they do study that situation through simulation tests.

“It’s a rare thing to see two engines go out at the same time,” Mr. Perra said.

Airports around the world have encountered bird collisions through the years, making them a standard hazard for commercial, military and private pilots alike.

“Any time you get an open field and grass, you’ve got birds,” said Robert W. Mann Jr., an aviation industry expert in Port Washington, N.Y. Mr. Mann said birds pose the greatest threat during takeoff, when jets use the most engine power in order to become aloft. Birds are also a hazard as the planes climb to cruising altitudes.

Bird strikes are frequently reported around 8,000 feet, especially during migration periods.

Although birds generally do not fly higher than 12,000 feet, there has been a report of a bird strike at 37,000 feet.

New York’s airports are particularly vulnerable to ocean-loving birds, according to Susan Elbin, director of conservation at New York City Audubon. Indeed, there are colonies of gulls on islands adjacent to J.F.K.

For years, the F.A.A., the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the United States Department of Agriculture have tried “to minimize the conflict between birds and planes,” Ms. Elbin said. Falcons, along with pyrotechnics, recordings of wild animals and propane cannons that create loud, startling noises, have been used to scare bird populations away from runways.

But sometimes, the airports have been forced to relocate the flocks, or in the most extreme cases, kill them.

“As a last resort you have to do lethal control to convince the rest of the flock that we mean business,” said Russell DeFusco, a member of the steering committee for Bird Strike Committee USA, a group that collects data on bird strikes.

Mr. Mann said pilots can do only so much to train for a possible bird strike. He called the response by the US Airways crew to the emergency “just remarkable.”

Said Mr. Mann: “It was a great piece of flying, both for putting it down where they would not endanger a lot of people, and for putting it down in one piece.”

Bird Hazard Is Persistent for Planes, NYT, 17.1.2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/nyregion/17strikecnd.html

Pilot Is Hailed

After Jetliner’s Icy Plunge

January 16, 2009
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

A US Airways jetliner with 155 people aboard lost power in both engines, possibly from striking birds, after taking off from La Guardia Airport on Thursday afternoon. The pilot ditched in the icy Hudson River and all on board were rescued by a flotilla of converging ferries and emergency boats, the authorities said.

What might have been a catastrophe in New York — one that evoked the feel if not the scale of the Sept. 11 attack — was averted by a pilot’s quick thinking and deft maneuvers, and by the nearness of rescue boats, a combination that witnesses and officials called miraculous.

As stunned witnesses watched from high-rise buildings on both banks, the Airbus A320, which had risen to 3,200 feet over the Bronx and banked left, came downriver, its fuselage lower than many apartment terraces and windows, in a carefully executed touchdown shortly after 3:30 p.m. that sent up huge plumes of water at midstream, between West 48th Street in Manhattan and Weehawken, N.J.

On board, the pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, 57, unable to get back to La Guardia, had made a command decision to avoid densely populated areas and try for the Hudson, and had warned the 150 passengers to brace for a hard landing. Most had their heads down as the jetliner slammed into the water, nose slightly up, just three minutes after takeoff on what was to be a flight to Charlotte, N.C.

Many on board and watching from the shores were shocked that the aircraft did not sink immediately. Instead, it floated, twisting and drifting south in strong currents, as three New York Waterway commuter ferries moved in. Moments later, terrified passengers began swarming out the emergency exits into brutally cold air and onto the submerged wings of the bobbing jetliner, which began taking in water.

As the first ferry nudged up alongside, witnesses said, some passengers were able to leap onto the decks. Others were helped aboard by ferry crews. Soon, a small armada of police boats, fireboats, tugboats and Coast Guard craft converged on the scene, and some of them snubbed up to keep the jetliner afloat. Helicopters brought wet-suited police divers, who dropped into the water to help with the rescues.

Over the next hour, as a captivated city watched continuous television reports and the Hudson turned from gold to silver in the gathering winter twilight, all of the passengers, including at least one baby, and both pilots and all three flight attendants, were transferred to the rescue boats — a feat that unfolded as the white-and-blue jetliner continued to drift south.

When all were out, the pilot walked up and down the aisle twice to make sure the plane was empty, officials said.

Brought ashore on both sides of the river, the survivors were taken to hospitals in Manhattan and New Jersey, mostly for treatment of exposure to the brutal cold: 18 degrees in the air, about 35 degrees in the water that many had stood in on the wings up to their waists.

Still, most of them walked ashore, some grim with fright and shivering with cold, wrapped in borrowed coats. But others were smiling, and a few were ready to give interviews to mobs of reporters and television cameras. Some described their survival as a miracle, a sentiment repeated later by city and state officials; others gave harrowing accounts of an ordeal whose outcome few might have imagined in such a crisis.

Even the aircraft was saved for examination by investigators — towed down the Hudson and tied up at Battery Park City. In the glare of floodlights, the top of its fuselage, part of a wing and the blue-and-red tail fin jutted out of the water, but its US Airways logo and many of its windows were submerged.

“We’ve had a miracle on 34th Street,” Gov. David A. Paterson said at a late-afternoon news conference in Manhattan. “I believe now we’ve had a miracle on the Hudson. This pilot, somehow, without any engines, was somehow able to land this plane, and perhaps without any injuries to the passengers. This is a potential tragedy that may have become one of the most magnificent days in the history of New York City agencies.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that there had been few injuries and that the pilot had done “a masterful job.”

W. Douglas Parker, chairman and chief executive of US Airways, and officials of the Federal Aviation Administration said that Flight 1549 had taken off from La Guardia at 3:26 p.m., bound for Charlotte. It headed north, across the East River and over the Bronx on a route that would involve a sweeping left turn to head south. But both engines lost power about a minute into the flight.

The National Transportation Safety Board and state and local agencies are to investigate the cause of the crash, which could take months, but early indications were that the plane’s engines had shut down after having ingested a flock of birds — variously described as geese or gulls. It was not clear where the birds were encountered.

The pilot radioed air traffic controllers on Long Island that his plane had sustained a “double bird strike.” Without power, returning to the airport was out of the question, aviation experts said. He saw a small airport in the distance, apparently at Teterboro, N.J., but decided to head down the Hudson and make a water landing, a rare event that is mentioned in the safety instructions given by flight crews to all passengers on every flight.

Aviation experts said such a maneuver is tricky. An angle of descent that is too steep could break off the wings and send the aircraft to the bottom. Witnesses in high-rise buildings on both sides of the river described a gradual descent that appeared to be carefully controlled, almost as if the choppy surface of the Hudson were a paved tarmac.

Susan Obel, a retiree who lives on West 70th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in a 20th-floor apartment, saw the plane flying amazingly low. “When you see a plane somewhere that it isn’t supposed to be, you get that eerie feeling,” she said. “I didn’t think it was a terrorist, but I did worry.”

On the plane, passengers heard the pilot say on the intercom, “Brace for impact.” One passenger, Elizabeth McHugh, 64, of Charlotte, seated on the aisle near the rear, said flight attendants shouted more instructions: feet flat on the floor, heads down, cover your heads. “I prayed and prayed and prayed,” she said. “Believe me, I prayed.”

Fulmer Duckworth, 41, who works in computer graphics for Bank of America — coincidentally, more than 20 of the passengers work for the bank, which is based in Charlotte — was in a meeting on the 29th floor of a building at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas when he saw the plane hit the water.

“It made this huge, gigantic splash, and I actually thought it was a boat crash at first,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me that it was a plane in the water.”

Neil Lasher, 62, a consultant for Sony Music Publishing who lives in a 27th-floor apartment near the shore in Guttenberg, N.J., watched the plane go down.

“As soon as the plane hit the water,” he said, “I could see the New York Waterway ferries from New York York and the Jersey side, within a minute, heading toward the airplane.”

The aircraft began to spin counterclockwise in the water and to drift south with the current.

“As soon as we hit, we all jolted frontward and sideways, and then the water started coming in around my feet,” Ms. McHugh said. She got up and was pushed along the aisle and out an exit, then slid down an inflated slide into a life raft.

One of the passengers who scrambled out onto the wing was Jeff Kolodjay, 31, who had been in Seat 22A in the rear. He said that after the emergency doors were opened, the plane began to take on water. In what he described as “organized chaos,” the passengers, all wearing life vests, “just walked through the water” toward the exits.

“We were just looking to be calm, and walking a straight line,” he said.

Dozens of survivors were taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center and St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. Jim Mandler, a spokesman at Roosevelt, said 10 patients, ranging from their early 30s to a woman about 85, had been treated, mainly for hypothermia. A flight attendant had suffered a lacerated leg.

At the Weehawken ferry terminal, passengers shivered under blankets. A woman on a stretcher was carried from the terminal to an ambulance, a dazed look on her face.

F.A.A. records showed that the aircraft involved in the crash had made at least two other emergency landings in this decade. On Feb. 2, 2002, pilots spotted flames in the left engine, and on June 23, 2003, indicators warned about problems with a landing gear. A later inspection showed it was a false warning.

Tom Fox, president of New York Water Taxi, which sent boats to the scene in the Hudson but did not participate in the rescues, said the setting was, in a sense, ideal for a crash landing on water. “It couldn’t have gone down in a better location because there are so many water-borne assets there,” he said. “The pilot must have been both talented and charmed.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael Barbaro, Ken Belson, Viv Bernstein, Ralph Blumenthal, Cara Buckley, Russ Buettner, Glenn Collins, Jim Dwyer, Kareem Fahim, Kevin Flynn, Anemona Hartocollis, Christine Hauser, Javier C. Hernandez, C. J. Hughes, Tina Kelley, Corey Kilgannon, Patrick LaForge, Andrew W. Lehren, Patrick McGeehan, Jo Craven McGinty, Mick Meenan, Christine Negroni, Kenny Porpora, William K. Rashbaum, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Marc Santora, Nate Schweber, Kirk Semple, Joel Stonington, A. E. Velez, Mathew R. Warren and Margot Williams.

Pilot Is Hailed After Jetliner’s Icy Plunge, NYT, 16.1.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/
nyregion/16crash.html

Fatal Crashes of Airplanes

Decline 65%

October 1, 2007
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — After two infamous crashes in 1996 that together killed 375 people, a White House commission told the airline industry and its regulators to reduce the domestic rate of fatal accidents 80 percent over 10 years. That clock ended Sunday.

They have come close to reaching that goal. Barring a crash before midnight Sunday, the drop in the accident rate will be about 65 percent, to one fatal accident in about 4.5 million departures, from one in nearly 2 million in 1997.

There have been no fatal airliner crashes involving scheduled flights this year in the United States and just one fatal accident: a mechanic who was trying to close the cabin door of a chartered Boeing 737 on the ground in Tunica, Miss., fell to the pavement during a rainstorm.

Around the world, airliners continue to crash. There have been 7 crashes this year that killed more than 20 people each.

Even so, there has been strong progress internationally. William R. Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, recently calculated that if the 1996 accident rate had remained the same in 2006, there would have been 30 major accidents last year. Instead, there were 11.

“This is the golden age of safety, the safest period, in the safest mode, in the history of the world,” said Marion C. Blakey, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, in a speech to an aviation group in Washington on Sept. 11, two days before her five-year term ended.

Some of the improvement may be luck, as there is an element of randomness to crashes. But part of the explanation certainly lies in the payoff from sustained efforts by American and many foreign airlines to identify and eliminate small problems that are common precursors to accidents.

Airlines around the world, even in less-developed nations, have also benefited from equipment improvements, like cockpit instruments that help planes steer clear of mountains when visibility is poor, and jet engines that are so reliable that pilots can go through their entire careers without seeing one fail.

Aviation safety experts have uncovered subtle problems. One oft-cited example is a discovery in the last decade by US Airways (then US Air) that many of its planes approaching Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina were coming in “high and hot,” too fast and at a steep angle.

As a result, airplanes were conducting “unstabilized approaches,” meaning pilots had to fiddle with flaps, throttle and other controls just before landing.

The US Airways discovery at Charlotte was something new because the airline did not demostrate it after a crash or from pilot reports.

The airline instead tapped into the system that feeds information to one of the “black boxes,” the flight data recorder, and siphoned off a stream of data that went to a removable recording device. Then it analyzed flights by the hundreds and looked for unusual patterns, a technique now common with airlines.

Convinced, the F.A.A. changed the approach procedure there, and the airport installed a system to guide planes at a proper angle.

Nearly all unstabilized approaches end with a safe landing, but a study by Mr. Voss’s organization found that such approaches were a factor in two-thirds of 76 accidents and serious incidents worldwide during landing attempts from 1984 to 1997. So one focus of the last 10 years has been to look for air traffic procedures that could cause problems.

The Air Line Pilots Association cited another problem that is now being resolved. The airlines pooled their data — an action that was itself an innovation — on operations at Reno, Nev., and found that the cockpit system that warns of imminent flight into a mountain often sounded a false alarm.

Aviation experts say that if safety alarms sound falsely too often, they become like the homeowner’s smoke alarm that is set off by an egg frying in the kitchen — people start ignoring it. As at Charlotte with the “high and hot” approaches, this was a known glitch in the system that had not caused any crashes, but that might someday contribute to one.

The solution in Reno, which is still being developed, is better guidance for pilots to follow flight paths precisely and stay farther away from mountains in the area.

In other places, improvements have been as simple as better signs on taxiways to prevent planes from moving into the path of other aircraft.

“It’s not one thing. It’s a series of small things,” said John Cox, who was an Air Line Pilots Association safety representative for 20 years. Many of those small things were minor problems observed in everyday operations, he said, then counted, scrutinized and eliminated before they caused an accident.

Newer planes are also safer. All American airliners, for example, now have “enhanced ground proximity warning systems.” These systems use the Global Positioning System to compare the plane’s position against a database of mountains and buildings, and warn of impending collision.

Analyzing data from safe flights is a reversal of the historic practice, which is to go out and “kick the tin” after a plane crash, looking for clues. Analyzing safe flights is almost all that is left, experts say, as the accident rate falls and there is less tin to kick.

“The sample is so small, you won’t have effective data sampling,” said Hank Krakowski, a United Airlines executive who served as co-chairman of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team. That team is an outgrowth of the White House commission, and it comprises airlines, aircraft builders and pilot unions. (In October, Mr. Krakowski is to become the F.A.A.’s chief operating officer.)

Some unions have complained about trends like maintenance outsourcing, in which an airline pays another airline or an outside shop to do crucial safety work, and some government auditors have echoed the concern.

But there have been no fatal crashes in which maintenance error was a cause since January 2003, when a US Airways Express flight, a Beechcraft 1900, went out of control on takeoff because of an improperly rigged tail. Statistically, the era of outsourcing appears to be safer than when airlines did most of the work themselves, although that does not suggest a cause-and-effect relationship.

The decade-long push to reduce the accident rate began with a “safety summit” in 1996, after the T.W.A. Flight 800 disaster off Long Island and the ValuJet crash in the Everglades of Florida. The summit was convened by the secretary of transportation at the time, Federico F. Pena, who declared a goal of zero accidents.

In 1997, a national commission on aviation safety and security, led by Vice President Al Gore and known as the Gore Commission, concluded that a more realistic goal would be to cut the rate of fatal accidents by 80 percent. Because crashes are sporadic, the goal was stated as the average of the most recent three years.

Despite the safety improvements since then, not all the trends are positive. Airports have lately recorded a disturbing number of what they call “proximity events,” in which a plane lands on a runway already occupied by another because someone made a wrong turn or a controller made an error.

On July 11, for example, a United plane in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., took a wrong turn onto a runway where a Delta Air Lines plane was supposed to land; the two came within 100 feet, according to the F.A.A.

“Probably the biggest threat of all, today, many, many people agree, is not so much a midair collision as a runway incursion incident,” said Richard Healing, an aviation safety expert and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board.

The F.A.A. has a radar system at many airports to warn tower controllers of conflicts on the airport surface, but the system can be confused by puddles on the pavement, which the radar sometimes misinterprets as airplanes. And it warns only the controllers, not the pilots directly.

The F.A.A. is improving the ability to track airplanes on the ground by gradually installing a system that uses a combination of radar and other means, including one that uses multiple antennas to listen for radio beacons on the plane and, by triangulation, calculate its position.

But the safety board argues that even if the new system works as designed, it is still inadequate because several seconds will elapse from the time the system sounds an alarm to when the controller sees it and issues instructions to pilots.

The F.A.A. is experimenting at Dallas-Fort Worth with “runway status lights,” embedded in the pavement, that flash at pilots when a runway is occupied.

As the number of flights increases, the rate of crashes has to decline or the absolute number of crashes will rise. And as airports get busier, the risk of a crash on the ground increases.

Adding to the problem is that airliners are getting smaller, and a new class of “very light jets,” seating four to eight people, is entering service. Some of those may be flown by a single pilot who is not a professional, but they will fly at the same altitudes as airliners.

The F.A.A. is facing challenges as it handles ever more traffic. It wants a new air traffic system that can squeeze planes closer together. It wants more reliance on user fees instead of taxes on passenger tickets, cargo and fuel.

But Congress has not agreed. It has approved only a temporary extension of current taxes. And although the F.A.A. administrator’s five-year term has expired, the White House has not named a candidate it will try to get through the Democratic Senate.

The aviation system continues to evolve, with new runways, new terminals and new towers.

In mid-September, the F.A.A. opened a new tower at Washington Dulles International Airport. It will handle 25 million to 26 million passengers this year, but the airport’s managers estimate that traffic will double by 2025. The number of runways will go to five from three, and midfield concourses will double to four.

The new tower replaces the signature Eero Saarinen model of the early ’60s, which is perched next to the sweeping roof line of the terminal. It can house up to a dozen working controllers comfortably; the old one was a squeeze for nine.

At 25 stories tall, it lets controllers see even small jets between the terminals. The older, shorter tower required them to strain to see some planes taxiing between terminals.

“With the regional jets, we’d see the top of the tail through the air-conditioners,” said David Bridson, a controller.

Fatal Crashes of Airplanes Decline 65%, NYT, 1.10.2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/
business/01safety.html

Survivors Recall Hindenburg

70 Years On

May 6, 2007
Filed at 4:24 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAKEHURST, N.J. (AP) -- At 87, Robert Buchanan says he sometimes has trouble remembering what he did 10 minutes ago. But he can recall in vivid detail the day 70 years ago when he watched the luxurious airship Hindenburg erupt into a fireball.

Flames roared across the surface of the mighty German dirigible only 100 or so feet above him, singeing his hair as he ran for his life.

''It was a piff-puff, just like someone would leave the gas on and not get the flame to it,'' said Buchanan, one of the last living members of the ground crew waiting to help the Hindenburg land.

Seventy years ago Sunday, the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg ignited while easing toward its mooring mast at the U.S. Navy base in Lakehurst. The blaze killed 35 people on board and one person in the ground crew; 62 passengers and crew members survived.

''I ran quite a distance because the heat, the flame, kept shooting out ahead of me,'' said Buchanan, of nearby Tuckerton. ''And I really didn't think I was going to make it, frankly.''

The huge airship -- more than three times longer than a Boeing 747 -- was engulfed in flames and sank to the ground in less than a minute. Photographers and newsreel crews on hand for the landing captured the scene, and a shocked radio station broadcaster recorded the often replayed phrase ''Oh, the humanity and all the passengers!''

The 804-foot-long Hindenburg was cutting-edge technology, with its fabric-covered, metal frame held aloft by more than 7 million cubic feet of lighter-than-air hydrogen. Flammable hydrogen had to be used because of a U.S. embargo on nonflammable helium.

It was ''the Concorde of its day back in 1936 and '37,'' said Carl Jablonski, president of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. But after the fire, he said, it would be called the ''Titanic of the sky.''

The historical society planned a private 70th anniversary memorial service Sunday at the crash site in Lakehurst, about 40 miles east of Philadelphia.

The Hindenburg was a swastika-emblazoned billboard for Nazi Germany, providing travel across the Atlantic in less than half the time of the standard four- to five-day ocean liner trip, said Rick Zitarosa, a vice president of the historical society. It carried more than 1,000 passengers on 10 successful round trips between Germany and Lakehurst in 1936, in addition to trips to Brazil the same year.

''It was the most luxurious experience in the air, before and since,'' Zitarosa said.

Hindenburg passengers ate gourmet meals off fine china, and drank French and German wines.

On May 6, 1937, more than 1,000 sightseers had gathered at Lakehurst to see the Hindenburg arrive with 61 crew and 36 passengers after its first trans-Atlantic flight of the year.

Buchanan, 17 at the time, was among more than 200 ground crew members waiting in rainy weather.

''The blessing is that I wore a sweater and I was soaking wet, absolutely wringing wet. And that's what I think saved us,'' Buchanan said.

As the Hindenburg came in and started dropping mooring lines, Associated Press photographer Murray Becker raised his camera.

''He was just going to make a nice picture of a dirigible coming in. And then it blew, right when he had his finger on the shutter,'' recalled Marty Lederhandler, 89, an AP photographer of 66 years who was working in the news service's New York darkroom when the Hindenburg crashed.

Eight-year-old passenger Werner Doehner saw chairs fall across the dining room door.

''Just instantly, the whole place was on fire,'' said Doehner, of Parachute, Colo., the last surviving passenger. ''My mother threw me out the window. She threw my brother out. Then she threw me, but I hit something and bounced back. She caught me and threw me the second time out. My sister was just too heavy for her. My mother jumped out and fractured her pelvis. Regardless of that, she managed to walk.''

Doehner, 78, still has trouble discussing the tragedy that killed his father and sister. He was hospitalized for months for treatment of burns.

''You either died a horrible death, or you got out with minor injuries. There weren't many cases that were in between,'' Zitarosa said.

The cause of the disaster is still debated. The most accepted theory is that static electricity from the day's storms ignited leaking hydrogen.

On the base in Lakehurst, a plaque and marker in the middle of an old airship landing area show where the Hindenburg met its end.

In the distance, the massive Hangar No. 1, built by the Navy in 1921 to house airships, houses an information center, which the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society runs in partnership with the military. Exhibits include old newspaper clippings, a metal girder from the Hindenburg, and dinnerware blackened by the fire.

Buchanan doesn't need the exhibits to jog his memory.

''A thing like that, you pretty much, in detail, you remember everything,'' he said.

------

On the Net:

Navy Lakehurst Historical Society: http://www.nlhs.com/

Survivors Recall Hindenburg 70 Years On, NYT, 6.5.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Hindenburg-70th.html

Manhattan Plane Crash

Kills Yankee Pitcher

October 12, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

A single-engine plane carrying the Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle smashed into a 42-story building on the Upper East Side yesterday, killing Mr. Lidle and his flight instructor, the authorities said.

The afternoon crash beneath overcast skies sent debris clattering hundreds of feet to the sidewalk and started a fire that destroyed several apartments and left a charred smudge on the face of the building.

Fourteen firefighters and four people in the building were injured, officials said, including a woman who had been in an apartment hit squarely by the plane and escaped the inferno, suffering burns.

The plane, owned by Mr. Lidle, was a Cirrus SR20, a four-seat propeller plane that is popular for its performance and sleek looks. It has a fixed landing gear reminiscent of a stunt plane. With two sets of controls, officials said, either Mr. Lidle or his instructor could have been flying it.

It slammed into the center of a 501-foot building several hundred yards from the East River. New Yorkers with memories of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center watched smoke drifting toward the sky as firefighters clambered into another high-rise, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command scrambled military jets. Some worried that they had witnessed another terrorist attack, but officials quickly dismissed that notion.

Mr. Lidle, 34, a pilot for less than a year who was traded to the Yankees in the summer, had talked enthusiastically about flying to his home in California this week.

As he cleaned out his locker at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, the day after the Yankees’ playoff hopes fizzled in a series loss in Detroit against the Tigers, he said that he planned to work on instrument training exercises yesterday before he left for California, and that his regular instructor, whom he identified as Tyler Stanger, was coming in to work with him. Officials said they believed that Mr. Stanger was the second victim.

The plane took off from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey about 2:30 p.m., according to a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said it circled the Statue of Liberty before heading north by the East River. Radar contact was lost around the Queensboro Bridge. He said it was not clear why the plane veered toward Manhattan, apparently after traveling farther north, and hit the building on the north side about 12 minutes after takeoff. The plane never got higher than 800 feet, according to Passur, a flight-tracking service.

Pilots describe that area of the East River as a particularly treacherous corridor that tends to be crowded with helicopters. Several witnesses said the plane appeared to be in trouble moments before it crashed. One investigator said initial reports indicated that the aircraft had radioed La Guardia Airport to say that it was running low on fuel.

The plane disintegrated as it hit the building, shaking bricks loose from the facade, and ended up as a smoking wreckage on the street. “The engine with the propeller was two feet inside the window,” another investigator said, adding that much of the rest of the plane had fallen to the street outside the building, at 524 East 72nd Street.

The plane bore into an apartment on the 30th floor, which under the building’s numbering system is Apt. 40ABG. Dr. Parviz Benhuri, who owns the apartment with his wife, Ilana, said she was at home when the plane blasted through the window and the apartment went up in flames.

“She told me she saw the window come out and the fire comes,” he said. “She told me she saw the window coming out and she ran. She’s in shock. She’s lucky she made it.”

She ran down the stairs and went to the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center nearby.

Three other people walked down from lower floors and were treated for exhaustion, one city official said.

Other witnesses said that the sequence of events leading to the crash unfolded so quickly that they realized only later that noises they had heard must have come from Mr. Lidle’s plane.

“It sounded like a truck gearing down,” said Kim Quarterman, a doorman at a nearby building. “Then I saw a cloud of smoke.”

Jeremy Chassen, a real estate developer who was in an apartment across the street, recognized the droning of an airplane engine — he has taken flight lessons himself.

Joanne Hartlaub, an actress and filmmaker who was working out in a gym across the street, heard explosions and a “loud whooshing noise, like something falling, very loud.”

She said she saw “this large object falling from the sky; it was aluminum and it was smoking.”

Inside the building that was struck, five construction workers going over renovation plans for an apartment on the 42nd floor looked out the window and the plane bearing down on them. One of the workers, Luis Gonzalez, 23, said it was so close that he could see the pilot’s face.

“It was coming right at us,” he said. “The whole building shook. Then we ran for the elevator.”

Fuel burned on the sidewalk as black smoke rose from the apartments above.

In the penthouse, a housekeeper, Ann Robert, was ironing clothes. “I heard a boom and saw smoke and ashes outside the kitchen window,” she said, “and then the painter came running in frantically from working in the baby’s room,” Ms. Robert said.

Her 21-year-old daughter was also in the apartment, watching television and talking on the telephone. Within seconds, Ms. Robert had grabbed her purse and was hurrying her to get out.

“Death was going through my mind,” Ms. Robert said. “When I saw the smoke, I did not know if we would make it out alive.” She added, “As I was coming down the stairs I thought that the whole building might come down and that me and my daughter might go at the same time. But once we got past the 30th floor, I said in my mind that maybe we were safe.”

The building is a condominium with residents like Marvin R. Shanken, the publisher of Cigar Aficionado and other specialty magazines; Marvin S. Traub, the former head of Bloomingdale’s; and Carol Higgins Clark, a mystery writer who is the daughter of Mary Higgins Clark. A dozen lower floors are used by the Hospital for Special Surgery for offices and guest rooms for patients’ families.

The building remained closed to residents last night. While structurally sound, a spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings said that there had been extensive damage and, with only one elevator working, it was not suitable for people to return.

For the Yankees, Mr. Lidle’s death stirred memories of another player who perished at the controls of his own plane, the catcher Thurman Munson, in 1979. But where Mr. Munson was the team captain, Mr. Lidle was still a newcomer.

A 5-foot-11 right-hander who rarely threw his fastball above 90 miles an hour, he was not drafted out of high school and played for three organizations in the minor leagues, including an independent team, before joining the Mets in 1997. He had also played for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Oakland Athletics, the Toronto Blue Jays, the Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies before joining the Yankees.

“He was a good guy, a real competitor,” said Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager. “He wasn’t here long, but I saw him compete for years with different teams, and he had a lot of success. That’s one of the reasons why we wanted him.”

Mr. Lidle made one memorable start, a victory on Aug. 21 that concluded the Yankees’ five-game sweep of the Red Sox in Boston’s Fenway Park. He had a 4-3 record with a 5.16 earned run average for the Yankees and made a brief relief appearance in the team’s final playoff game on Saturday.

For his career, Lidle was 82-72 with a 4.57 earned run average, pitching in 277 games. He was a free agent and was not expected to return to the Yankees, though he said on Sunday that he hoped to sign a two-year contract this winter.

Mr. Lidle, who was married with a 6-year-old son, lived in Glendora, Calif. He had earned his pilot’s license during the last off-season. He said last month that the four-year-old plane had cost $187,000 and had “cool safety features.”

“The whole plane has a parachute on it,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you’re up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.”

Shortly after his trade to New York from Philadelphia, he flew his plane from a small airport in southern New Jersey to Teterboro. Describing his itinerary in a September interview, he said: “I didn’t fly around New York, but I flew straight up north. I don’t like to go in the big boys’ airspace.”

But yesterday, he did. The plane left Teterboro at 2:29 p.m., officials said.

Police and fire officials applauded what they said was a fast and efficient response, noting that there were no fatalities beyond the two men in the plane. They said that they too had worried at first that the crash was a terrorist attack.

“We are concerned about the possibility of things being something more than an accident,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. “But it seemed clear fairly early it was a small plane.”

Gov. George E. Pataki issued a statement saying that the Federal Aviation Administration had issued a temporary flight restriction requiring all planes flying below 1,500 feet to be in communication with air traffic controllers.

The governor said that he was asking F.A.A. officials to leave the restrictions in effect while they and officials of the Department of Homeland Security review the rules that apply to private airplanes flying in the New York City area.

“New York’s airspace should enjoy the same kind of protections as our nation’s capital,” Mr. Pataki said.

Reporting was contributed

by Al Baker, Cara Buckley, Rebecca Cathcart,

Joe Drape, Kate Hammer, Tyler Kepner,

Thomas J. Lueck, Jo Craven McGinty,

Patrick McGeehan, William Neuman,

Anthony Ramirez, William K. Rashbaum,

Matthew Sweeney, Matthew Wald

and Margot Williams.

Manhattan Plane Crash Kills Yankee Pitcher, NYT, 12.10.2006,
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/
nyregion/12crash.html

Test pilot Scott Crossfield

killed in crash

Posted 4/20/2006
6:51 PM ET
The Associated Press
By Daniel Yee
USA Today

RANGER, Ga. — Scott Crossfield, the hotshot test pilot and aircraft designer who in 1953 became the first man to fly at twice the speed of sound, was killed in the crash of his small plane, authorities said Thursday. He was 84.

Crossfield's body was found in the wreckage Thursday in the mountains about 50 miles northwest of Atlanta, a day after the single-engine plane he was piloting dropped off radar screens on a flight from Alabama to Virginia. There were thunderstorms in the area at the time.

The cause of the crash was under investigation. Crossfield was believed to be the only person aboard.

During the 1950s, Crossfield embodied what came to be called "the right stuff," dueling the better-known Chuck Yeager for supremacy among America's Cold War test pilots. Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947; only weeks after Crossfield reached Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, Yeager outdid him.

The Cessna 210A in which Crossfield died was a puny flying machine compared with the rocket-powered aircraft he flew as a test pilot. During his heyday, he routinely climbed into some of the most powerful, most dangerous and most complex pieces of machinery of his time, took them to their performance limits or beyond — or "pushed the envelope," as test pilots put it — and usually brought them back to Earth in one piece.

"He's really one of the major figures," said Peter Jakab, aerospace chairman at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. "He was not only the great cutting-edge research pilot ... but after that, he continued to be a great adviser and participant in all aspects of aerospace."

Crossfield, who lived in Herndon, Va., and flew regularly into his 80s, was a member of a group of civilian pilots assembled by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, in the early 1950s. Yeager did his test-flying as an Air Force pilot.

Crossfield flew Mach 2 on Nov. 20, 1953, when he hit 1,300 mph in NACA's Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket. The plane reached an altitude of 72,000 feet.

After leaving NACA, he had a major role in the development of the X-15 rocket plane and piloted it on several of its early test flights in the early 1960s.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin hailed him as "a true pioneer whose daring X-15 flights helped pave the way for the space shuttle."

"We keep talking about test pilots, but there is no such thing as a 'test pilot,'" Crossfield said in a 1988 interview with Aviation Week & Space Technology. "They are all just people who incidentally do flight tests. ... We should divest ourselves of this idea of special people (being) heroes, if you please, because really they do not exist."

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's history of the dawn of the space age, Wolfe portrayed Crossfield, Yeager and other members of the brotherhood of test pilots as possessors of "the right stuff," which the author defined as "the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment — and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day."

The first group of seven NASA astronauts was selected in 1959. Bob Jacobs, a NASA spokesman, said Thursday that Crossfield never applied, though he did some engineering work on the Apollo space program. Many test pilots sneered at the Mercury program and did not consider it real flying; they regarded astronauts as little more than "Spam in a can" because their capsules were controlled from the ground.

Born in Berkeley, Calif., in 1921, Crossfield interrupted his studies at the University of Washington to join the Navy in 1942. He learned to fly a variety of aircraft during his Navy service.

Attempts to break the sound barrier in the years following World War II involved high stakes and some big egos.

On Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager finally reached the landmark, pushing his orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane, past 660 mph over the Mojave Desert in California. His feat was kept top secret for about a year.

The now 83-year-old Yeager, in his book Yeager: An Autobiography, described friction between the military pilots and the civilian NACA pilots. He groused that Crossfield "was a proficient pilot, but also among the most arrogant I've met. ... None of us blue suiters was thrilled to see a NACA guy bust Mach 2."

The competition did not end at Mach 2. On Dec. 12, 1953, just a few days before the 50th anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight, Yeager bested Crossfield when he flew an X-1A to a record speed of more than Mach 2.4, or more than 1,600 mph.

The upcoming Wright anniversary had weighed on his mind, Yeager wrote: "The television networks had scheduled special programs about Crossfield and his Mach 2 flight. ... Our plan was to smash Scotty's record on December 12."

Nowadays, the best fighter jets can fly well over Mach 2.

Crossfield left NACA in 1955 to work for North American Aviation on the X-15 project, including its first flight, an unpowered glide, in 1959. Other early X-15 test flights were made by pilots Joe Walker and Robert White.

In one of his test flights, Crossfield reached about three times the speed of sound on Nov. 15, 1960, in an X-15 launched from a B-52 bomber. The plane reached an altitude of 81,000 feet.

There were some close calls. During an X-15 flight in 1959, one of the engines exploded. The emergency landing broke the aircraft's back just behind the cockpit, but Crossfield was not injured, according to the Edwards Air Force Base website.

Less than a year later, a malfunctioning valve caused a catastrophic explosion during a ground test while Crossfield was in the cockpit. He again escaped injury.

In later years, he was an executive for Eastern Airlines and Hawker Siddley Aviation and a technical consultant to the House Committee on Science and Technology.

"I am an aeronautical engineer, an aerodynamicist and a designer," he told Aviation Week & Space Technology. "My flying was only primarily because I felt that it was essential to designing and building better airplanes for pilots to fly."

More recently, Crossfield had a key role in preparations for the attempt to re-enact the Wright brothers' flight on the 100th anniversary of their feat on the sand dunes near Kitty Hawk, N.C. Crossfield trained four pilots, and one of them, Kevin Kochersberger, was selected for the Dec. 17, 2003, attempt.

But in the end, unsuitable weather doomed the attempt to get the replica into the air. The plane plopped into wet sand as the crowd of 35,000 groaned.

Among his many honors, Crossfield was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1983.

Test pilot Scott Crossfield killed in crash,
UT,
20.4.2006,
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-04-20-
crossfieldobituary_x.htm - broken link

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