AIR FLORIDA FLIGHT 90

'Air Florida Flight 90' was an Air Florida flight of a Boeing 737-222 airliner that crashed into the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. on January 13, 1982 immediately after takeoff in a severe snowstorm. The accident claimed the lives of 78 people, including four motorists on the 14th Street Bridge. However, a few survivors from the shattered aircraft were rescued from the icy river by a combination of heroic efforts of civilians and professionals. Some of that heroism was commended during President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union speech a few days later. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the cause of the accident was pilot error. The pilots failed to switch on the engines' internal anti-icing equipment, used reverse thrust in a snow storm prior to take-off, and failed to abort takeoff per FAA regulations even after detecting a power problem while taxiing, and visually identifying ice and snow buildup on the wings.

Contents

Summary

Record cold weather conditions

Delays, poor decisions, crash

Hampered response, unlikely heroes

The only rescue helicopter arrives

Responses in the media

NTSB conclusion

Honoring heroism

Regulatory and procedure changes

References

Notes

External links

Summary

There were 74 passengers (including three infants) and five crew members on board. All but five of the occupants of the plane died. The aircraft struck the bridge which carries Interstate Highway 395 between Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia. It crushed seven occupied vehicles on the 14th Street Bridge which killed four people and took out 20 feet of guard rail before it plunged through the ice into the Potomac River. A total of 78 persons died in what was the worst air disaster in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The crash occurred less than two miles from the White House and within view of both the Jefferson Memorial and The Pentagon.

Record cold weather conditions

During the second week of January 1982, one of the worst periods of exceptionally cold weather in history had struck the east coast of the United States. Atlanta, Georgia recorded freezing temperatures, and the citrus crop in Florida was considered to be at risk. For several days, freezing temperatures had brought vehicles to a standstill and interfered with daily activities around the nation's capital.
On January 13, at Washington National Airport (DCA), which is located in Arlington, Virginia, immediately across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., the airport had opened at noon under marginal conditions. The crew of Air Florida Flight 90 had left Miami at 11:00 a.m. EST, and arrived at about 1:45 p.m. EST.
That afternoon they were to return south to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL), Fort Lauderdale, Florida with an intermediate stop at Tampa International Airport (TPA), Tampa, Florida. The scheduled departure time was delayed about 1 hour 45 minutes due to a moderate to heavy snowfall, which temporarily closed the airport.

Delays, poor decisions, crash

The aircraft was de-iced by spraying the wings with the de-icing agent monopropylene glycol but the plane had trouble leaving the gate when the ground services tow motor couldn't get traction on the ice. For a period of close to five minutes the crew elected to use the reverse thrust of the 737's JT8D engines, ingesting ice and failing to move the aircraft. Cooler heads prevailed and a tug properly equipped with snow chains was used to push the aircraft back from the gate. After finally leaving the departure gate the Boeing 737-222 aircraft waited on a taxiway for 49 minutes in line with other aircraft for clearance to use the congested airport's only instrument-rated runway. This departure runway requires a treacherous flight path north following the river and winding between restricted airspace and obstacles such as the Washington Monument and The Pentagon.

The pilot apparently decided not to return to the gate for reapplication of de-icing, fearing the flight's departure would be even further delayed, and chose to continue waiting to takeoff. Then, with snow and ice on the airfoil surfaces of the aircraft, the aircraft attempted to take off on the main (and only open) runway in heavy snow at 3:59 p.m. EST. Even though it was freezing and snowing, the crew did not activate the anti-ice systems. Analysis (confirmed by the FBI) of the cockpit voice recorder determined that during the departure checklist, the copilot announced, and the pilot confirmed, that the plane's own anti-icing system was turned off. This system uses heat from the engines to prevent sensors from freezing and providing inaccurate readings.
During the plane's taxiing, the cockpit voice recorder picked up this conversation between the captain and first officer, in which they discussed the icing situation.
Adding to the plane's troubles was the pilots' decision to maneuver closely behind a DC-9 that was taxiing just ahead of the Air Florida aircraft prior to takeoff due to their mistaken belief that the warmth from the DC-9's engines would melt snow and ice accumulated on Flight 90's wings. This action — which went specifically against flight manual recommendations for an icing situation — actually contributed to additional icing on the accident aircraft.
Neither the captain nor the first officer had much experience flying in snowy, cold weather. And the captain, Larry Wheaton, had failed a flight simulator test the previous year with one of his instructors citing Wheaton's unfamiliarity with flight rules and regulations. He took a repeat test soon after and passed.
As it turned out, the failure to operate the plane's anti-icing system caused exactly what could be expected to happen: the Engine Pressure Ratio (EPR) thrust indicators provided false high readings — when the pilots thought they had throttled up to the correct take-off EPR of 2.04, the actual EPR was only 1.70. The aircraft traveled almost ½ mile (800 m) further down the runway than is customary before liftoff was accomplished. Survivors of the crash indicated the trip over the runway was extremely rough, one of whom admitted he feared that they would not get airborne and would "fall off the end of the runway."
As the plane began its takeoff roll the first officer noted several times to the captain that the readings he was seeing on the instrument panel didn't seem to reflect reality (he was referring to the fact that the plane didn't seem to have developed as much power as it needed for takeoff, despite the controls saying otherwise.) The captain dismissed the first officer's concerns and let the takeoff proceed. Investigators later determined that there was plenty of time and space on the runway for the captain to have aborted the takeoff and criticized his refusal to listen to his first officer who was correct that the instrument panel readings were wrong. The captain likely felt pressure to depart quickly because he knew another aircraft was on final approach using the same runway. Indeed, that aircraft landed just as the Air Florida plane took off and had Flight 90 aborted its takeoff the aircraft on final would have been instructed by air traffic controllers to execute a missed approach, delaying the arrival.
Below is a transcript of Flight 90's cockpit voice recorder during the plane's acceleration down the runway. It's evident that the first officer saw a problem with the instrumentation and that the captain shrugged off his concerns. (CAM-1 is the captain, CAM-2 is the first officer)
: 15:59:32 CAM-1 Okay, your throttles.
: 15:59:35 [SOUND OF ENGINE SPOOLUP]
: 15:59:49 CAM-1 Holler if you need the wipers.
: 15:59:51 CAM-1 It's spooled. Real cold, real cold.
: 15:59:58 CAM-2 God, look at that thing. That don't seem right, does it? Uh, that's not right.
: 16:00:09 CAM-1 Yes it is, there's eighty.
: 16:00:10 CAM-2 Naw, I don't think that's right. Ah, maybe it is.
: 16:00:21 CAM-1 Hundred and twenty.
: 16:00:23 CAM-2 I don't know
: 16:00:31 CAM-1 Vee-one. Easy, vee-two.
As the plane became briefly airborne, the flight-recorder picked up these words from the cockpit, with the sound of the stick-shaker (an instrument that warns that the plane is in danger of stalling) in the background:
: 16:00:39 [SOUND OF STICKSHAKER STARTS AND CONTINUES UNTIL IMPACT]
: 16:00:41 TWR Palm 90 contact departure control.
: 16:00:45 CAM-1 Forward, forward, easy. We only want five hundred.
: 16:00:48 CAM-1 Come on forward....forward, just barely climb.
: 16:00:59 CAM-1 Stalling, we're falling!
: 16:01:00 CAM-2 Larry, we're going down, Larry....
: 16:01:01 CAM-1 I know it!
: 16:01:01 [SOUND OF IMPACT]
Although the aircraft did manage to become airborne, it attained a maximum altitude of just 337 feet before it began losing altitude. Recorders later indicated that the aircraft was airborne for just 30 seconds. At 4:01 p.m. EST it crashed into the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac River, 0.75 nautical miles (1400 m) from the end of the runway.
It hit six cars and a truck on the bridge, and tore away 20 feet of guard rail. The wrecked aircraft then plunged into the freezing Potomac River. All but the tail section quickly became submerged. Remarkably, it crashed in between two bridges, the second bridge being the high occupancy vehicle (HOV) only bridge that was full of buses and people going away from DC during the afternoon commute.
As a result of injuries received during the crash, four of the five crew members including both pilots, and 69 of the 74 passengers perished, leaving only six survivors in the freezing water out of the 79 who had been aboard the aircraft. There were also four fatalities among the motorists on the bridge with four others on the bridge injured. Of the passengers killed in the crash, all but one were killed by the forces involved in the impact, not by drowning.
Clinging to the tail section of the broken airliner with five passengers in the ice-choked Potomac River, flight attendant Kelly Duncan inflated the only flotation device they could find and passed it to one of the more-injured passengers, Nikki Felch.
Joe Stiley assisted fellow survivor, Priscilla Tirado, and tried to tow her to shore, when the Park Police helicopter returned to try to pull them to safety.

Hampered response, unlikely heroes

The blizzard conditions developed fairly suddenly on this day and many Federal Government offices in downtown Washington had just been closed early. Thus, there was a massive backup of traffic on almost all of the city's roads, making it almost impossible for ambulances to reach the crash site. The United States Coast Guard's ''Capstan'' (WYTL 65601) a 65-foot harbor tugboat and its crew based nearby whose duties include ice breaking and responding to such a water rescue were considerably far downriver on another search and rescue mission. Emergency ground response was greatly hampered by ice-covered roads and gridlocked traffic. Ambulances attempting to reach the scene were even driven down the sidewalk in front of the White House. Rescuers who did reach the site stood and watched in horror as they had no adequate equipment to reach the survivors and the below-freezing waters and heavy ice made swimming out to them all but impossible. Multiple attempts to try to throw a makeshift lifeline (made out of belts and any other things available that could be tied together) out to the survivors proved ineffective.
One man, Roger Olian, a sheet-metal foreman at St Elizabeth's, a Washington hospital for the mentally ill, was on his way home across the 14th Street bridge in his truck when he heard a man yelling that there was an aircraft in the water. He was the first to jump into the water to attempt to contact the survivors. At the same time, several military personnel from the Pentagon, Steve Raines, Aldo De La Cruz, and Steve Bell, ran down to the water's edge to help Roger.
Finally, a United States Park Service Police helicopter arrived, attempting to navigate between the two bridges and figure out how to rescue the survivors clinging to the tail section of the plane.

The only rescue helicopter arrives

News cameramen watched helplessly from the bridge, being only able to record the disaster for the rest of the world to see. Suddenly, hope arrived in the form of a park police helicopter trailing a lifeline reaching to the outstretched arms of the victims in the water below. The pilot apparently had to navigate by following the freeway out to the Potomac River from the small windows on the bottom of the copter as air visibility was zero at the time. Further compounding the problem was that the disaster location - or exactly what was the disaster - was unknown as flight controllers were only aware that the plane had disappeared from the runway and did not respond to radio calls, but had no idea what had happened or where the plane was.
At approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, ''Eagle 1'', a United States Park Police Bell 206L-1 Long Ranger helicopter, N2PP, based at the "Eagles Nest" at Anacostia Park in Washington, D.C. and manned by pilot Donald W. Usher and paramedic Melvin E. (Gene) Windsor arrived and began attempting to assist the survivors to shore. At great risk to themselves, the crew worked close to the river surface, at one time coming so close to the ice-clogged river that the helicopter's skids went beneath the surface of the water.
The helicopter crew lowered a line to survivors to tow them to shore. First to receive the line, Bert Hamilton, who was treading water about ten feet from the floating tail, took the single lifeline dangling beneath the chopper and passed it under his arms. The others watched while the helicopter carried him a hundred yards to the Virginia shore and returned. The helicopter pilot had to gently move the survivor across the ice, while avoiding the sides of the bridge and keeping an eye on the crowd. By now, some fire rescue had arrived but military personnel and civilians were the key in pulling the survivors from the shore up to the waiting ambulances. The survivors were nearly frozen with ice on their clothes, making them feel like they were 3 times their body weight. It would take 6 people to get each survivor from the shore up to the waiting ambulances. The helicopter returned to the location of the aircraft's tail, and this time a survivor sometimes referred to as "the sixth passenger" (later identified as Arland D. Williams Jr.) caught the line. Instead of wrapping it around himself, however, he passed it to flight attendant Kelly Duncan. On its third trip back to the wreckage, the helicopter trailed two lifelines, for its crew knew that survival in the river was now only a matter of minutes. One of the lines was aimed at "the sixth passenger." He caught it again, and again passed it on, this time to Joe Stiley, the most severely injured survivor. Stiley slipped the line around his waist and grabbed Priscilla Tirado who, having lost her husband and baby, was in complete hysteria. Patricia Felch took the second line, and the helicopter pulled away. Before it reached the shore, however, both Priscilla Tirado and Patricia Felch lost their grip and fell back into the water.

By then one of these passengers, Priscilla Tirado, was too weak to grab the line. A watching bystander, Congressional Budget Office assistant Lenny Skutnik, stripped off his coat and boots, and in short sleeves, dove into the icy water, and swam out to assist her. The helicopter then proceeded to where Patricia Felch had fallen and paramedic Gene Windsor dropped from the safety of the helicopter into the water to attach a line to her. By the time the helicopter crew could return for the sixth passenger, the last survivor, both he and the plane's tail section had disappeared beneath the icy surface. He had been in the paralyzing cold for twenty-nine minutes. His body and those of the other occupants were later recovered. According to the coroner, this man, who had passed the lifeline to others, was the only plane passenger to die by drowning.
Even as the response of emergency crews to the scene was frustrated by the traffic on surface streets, a half hour after the plane crashed, the Washington Metro suffered its first fatal subway crash which meant that Washington's nearest airport, one of its main bridges in or out of the city and one of its busiest subway lines were all closed simultaneously, paralyzing the Washington, D.C. area.

Responses in the media

News media outlets followed the story with diligence. Notably, ''The Washington Post'' published a story about the unidentified survivor of the impact (the "sixth passenger") who handed the lifeline to others and apparently drowned before he could be rescued himself.
One day after the crash, shock jock Howard Stern called Air Florida during his radio show on WWDC-FM and asked what the fare was for a one-way ticket from Washington National Airport to the 14th Street Bridge. The controversy from this and other incidents led to Stern's eventual dismissal from the station.^[1]

NTSB conclusion

The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of this accident was pilot error stating that the flight crew’s failure to use engine anti-ice during ground operation and takeoff, their decision to take off with snow/ice on the airfoil surfaces of the aircraft, and the captain’s failure to reject the takeoff during the early stage when his attention was called to anomalous engine instrument readings.
"Contributing to the accident were the prolonged ground delay between de-icing and the receipt of ATC takeoff clearance during which the aircraft was exposed to continual precipitation, the known inherent pitch up characteristics of the B-737 aircraft when the leading edge is contaminated with even small amounts of snow or ice, and the limited experience of the flight crew in jet transport winter operations."
The aircraft, N62AF, was first delivered to United Airlines in 1969 as N9050U Boeing serial #19556 and was the 130th aircraft off the 737 line.^[2]

Honoring heroism

The "sixth passenger", who had survived the crash and had repeatedly given up the rescue lines to other survivors before drowning, was later identified as 46-year-old bank examiner Arland D. Williams Jr. The repaired span of the 14th Street Bridge complex over the Potomac River at the crash site, which had been officially named the "Rochambeau Bridge", was renamed the "Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge" in his honor. The Citadel in South Carolina, from which he graduated in 1957, has several memorials to him. In 2003, the new Arland D. Williams Jr. Elementary School was dedicated in his hometown of Mattoon in Coles County, Illinois.
Civilians Roger Olian and Lenny Skutnik received the United States Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal. Arland D. Williams also received the award posthumously. Skutnik was introduced to the joint session of the U.S. Congress during President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union speech later that month. President Reagan also personally contacted and privately thanked Roger Olian.
The two crewmen of the U.S. Park Police helicopter ''Eagle 1'' were awarded the United States Coast Guard's Silver Lifesaving Medal. The U.S. Park Service is part of the United States Department of the Interior. Pilot Donald W. Usher and paramedic Melvin E. Windsor also received the Department of the Interior's Valor Award from Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt in a special ceremony soon afterward. Usher is now Superintendent of the U.S. Park Police Training Academy in Brunswick, Georgia.
Roger Olian, Lennie Skutnik, Donald Usher, and Melvin Windsor each received the Carnegie Hero Fund Medal.
Kelly Duncan, the only surviving flight attendant, was recognized in the NTSB accident report for her "unselfish act" of giving the only lifevest she could find to another passenger.[2]

Regulatory and procedure changes

The investigation following the crash, especially regarding the failure of the pilot to respond to crew concerns about the de-icing procedure, lead to a number of reforms in FAA regulations [3]. It would become a widely used case study for both air crews and rescue workers. Another result of the accident was the development of an improved rescue harness for use in helicopter recoveries.

References

★ Trivers, R. L. & Newton, H. P. The crash of flight 90: doomed by self-deception? Science Digest (November 1982): pp 66,67,111.

★ History Channel program on Air Florida Flight 90.

Notes

1. [1]
2. Boeing 737 Production List

External links

★ NTSB Report AAR-82/08 Air Florida, Inc., Boeing 737-222, N62AF, Collision with 14th Street Bridge near Washington National Airport Washington, D.C. January 13, 1982

★ Full NTSB Accident Report

★ AirDisaster.Com Special Report: Air Florida Flight 90

★ Air Florida Flight 90: Reservists remember

★ Roads to the Future website - 14th Street Bridge, the Air Florida Crash, and Subway Disaster

★ Cockpit voice recording transcript for the crash of Air Florida Flight 90

★ Aviation Safety Network - report on Air Florida Flight 90

★ Accident details at planecrashinfo.com

★

★ Arlington VA Fire Department response details to Air Florida 90 crash

★ Aviation Past Accident Files, Air Florida Flight 90

★ Bridge of Sighs (2003 report on the survivors 21 years later)

★ Arlington Fire Journal (Detailed account of Arlington County Fire Dept. operations at crash site)