Josh Funk
New Jersey: A United Airlines jet came dangerously close to disaster when it hit a semi-trailer truck and a light pole on the New Jersey Turnpike as it came in to land at Newark Liberty International Airport.
“A major catastrophe was avoided by feet,” said safety expert Steve Arroyo, who landed on that same short runway many times during his career at United. “Had it been another five feet (1.5 metres) lower, eight feet, I mean, no more than 10 feet, that plane would have been all over the New Jersey Turnpike.”
The driver of the bakery delivery truck was treated at a hospital for minor injuries, and the Boeing 767 flying in from Venice, Italy, with 231 people aboard landed safely. No one on the plane was hurt. Air traffic control audio suggests the incident may have created a hole in the side of the plane, but the airline and the National Transportation Safety Board haven’t confirmed that.
In March, a flight attendant still strapped in her seat survived being thrown from an Air Canada plane that collided with a fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
The NTSB said on Monday afternoon (US time) that it has reclassified the United incident as an accident because of the extent of the damage to the plane, but it didn’t provide any details.
Anyone who drives that section of Interstate 95 near the airport is likely used to seeing planes coming in low and crossing over all the lanes of traffic as the planes get ready to land, but never this low.
Dashboard camera video from inside the truck showed the driver singing happily to himself, then glancing out his window with a slight look of concern as the sound of the jet’s whining engines began on the recording.
A moment later, part of the plane zooms into view out the driver’s side window. The video also shows the moment of impact. Typically, semi-trailers are 4.1 metres tall, so the plane was quite low.
Chuck Paterakis, the vice president of H&S Family of Bakeries, said the company is “relieved that everyone is safe, as that is our top priority”. The bakery is cooperating with investigators.
The pilots’ damage report wasn’t recorded because the crew opted to call the tower on the phone after landing instead of broadcasting the details over the radio.
But air traffic control audio posted by ATC.com revealed a discussion between an air traffic controller and a ground vehicle more than half an hour after the incident. “They felt something over the threshold and there’s a hole in the side of the airplane,” the controller said.
‘I never expected a plane that low’
Patrick Oyulu, of Edison, New Jersey, was among those on the turnpike when the plane struck the truck. He posted a short video showing the aftermath of the collision, as the huge plane barely cleared the road and landed on the runway.
“The plane seemed to come in almost directly over the highway,” Oyulu recounted in a message to The Associated Press. He said the truck appeared to swerve sharply and smoke could be seen coming from it after the aircraft apparently made contact.
“I never expected a plane that low, and never expected I would see the undercarriage of a plane of that magnitude bearing overhead, with such noise and gust of wind,” Oyulu said.
Shortest runway at the airport
NTSB investigators arrived at the scene on Monday to interview the flight crew and begin working out how and why this happened. But the NTSB may not offer many details about what happened until it publishes its preliminary report roughly a month from now. The agency does not plan any news conferences about the accident.
Runway 29, where the plane landed, is the shortest runway at the airport at 2050 metres, and is usually used when there are strong winds, as there were on Sunday afternoon. The other two Newark runways are 3353 metres long. An air traffic controller told pilots at the time that the winds were gusting up to 50 kilometres per hour.
Arroyo said that investigators will definitely look at how well the United crew planned for the contingency that they would have to land on Runway 29 and exactly what data they entered into their flight control system and navigational aids. He said those systems can help keep pilots on track in the glidepath before they have to take the controls and complete the landing visually.
“It’s one of the most challenging approaches in the world,” Arroyo said. “The margin of error is extremely low.”
Jeff Guzzetti, a former crash investigator for the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration, said investigators are also likely to look at whether fatigue could have been a factor after the long flight from Italy.
The NTSB directed United to preserve the cockpit voice and flight data recorders for investigators to examine. The airline said the pilots have been put on leave while the accident is investigated.
In 1985, Delta Flight 191 was coming in to land at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport when a microburst of wind during a thunderstorm sent the plane down into the ground, striking a vehicle. The plane then ploughed into the airport water tanks. A total of 137 people died in that crash, including the vehicle’s driver.
AP
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