Southwest Airlines Capt. Bruce Sutherland couldn’t see the touchdown markings on the snowy runway at Midway Airport on Dec. 8, and his plane was skidding toward the end of a landing strip that was, to him, a “black hole.”
“Come on, baby. … Son of a [expletive],” the captain blurted out, according to cockpit transcripts released Tuesday.
“Jump on the brakes, are ya?” First Officer Steven Oliver yelled back.
“Oh, no, a car,” Sutherland shouted after Flight 1248 overran the end of the runway.
The Boeing 737-700 rolled through two fences and landed on top of a car on Central Avenue, crushing and killing Joshua Woods, 6. As National Transportation Safety Board officials opened a two-day fact-finding hearing Tuesday, they focused on a series of events and decisions that broke the aviation safety chain, standards and procedures designed to prevent a single misstep from causing disaster.
The transcripts show a crew acknowledging it was operating near the margins of safety as it prepared to land in bad weather on one of Midway’s relatively short runways.
The pilots considered diverting the flight to St. Louis or Kansas City, Mo., and at several points seemed to rule out the idea of trying to land at Midway. But after each moment of reconsideration, they continued toward Chicago, apparently willing to put off the final decision.
The onboard flight computer calculated that the plane would come to a stop with only 30 feet of runway to spare, based on the assumption that the runway condition was poor, as some pilots reported earlier.
“Wow. Wooo. If it’s poor it’s scary,” Oliver is recorded telling Sutherland about Midway’s deteriorating runway conditions midway into the flight.
“I ain’t doin’ it,” replied Sutherland, who had a 26-year career as an Air Force pilot before joining Southwest in 1995.
Sutherland and Oliver apparently mistakenly thought they had a larger buffer than 30 feet of runway. They thought that thrust-reversers would slow the aircraft more quickly than the computer indicated, officials said. But Southwest programs its 737-700 computers to account for the thrust-reversers.
In any event, the thrust-reversers were of minimum assistance on Flight 1248, NTSB investigator-in-charge Robert Benzon told the hearing.
Sutherland experienced problems lifting the reverse-thruster levers. Oliver finally deployed the devices, but the full effect of reverse thrust was not obtained until 27 seconds after the plane touched down, Benzon said. The plane skidded off the runway about seven seconds later.
The possibility of that grim outcome had occurred to the pilots much earlier in the flight, as they were discussing using an unfamiliar automatic braking system for the first time, the transcripts show.
“No procedure if that sucker fails when you touch down?” Oliver asked Sutherland as the plane approached Chicago. “We just go through the fence? We never talk about any of that stuff, ya know?”
While a strong drive to complete a mission has been identified as a contributing factor in some aviation accidents, Sutherland told investigators that he did not feel any pressure from Southwest to complete the flight to Chicago if he considered it dangerous.
As the snowstorm intensified, co-pilot Oliver made an announcement that the plane would be on the ground in about 25 minutes, telling passengers “…we’re gonna get you safely on your way.”
But in the seclusion of the cockpit, the two pilots repeatedly discussed the messy runway conditions at Midway. With a mixture of concern and confidence, they checked and rechecked the possibilities.
“The weather outside is frightful,” Oliver said in what the transcript describes as a singsong voice–evoking the words of a Christmas carol–about an hour into the scheduled 1 1/2-hour flight, which had departed Baltimore about two hours late because of the winter storm socking the Midwest.
“The weather outside is rosy,” Sutherland responded. Both men laughed.
The pilots were aware that another Southwest plane landed on the same Midway runway nine minutes before they did.
But they did not know that just a few minutes later, before Flight 1248’s landing, a different Southwest flight crew didn’t like what they saw at Midway and decided to fly to St. Louis.
The Flight 1248 pilots had agreed early on that they would try to land at Midway so long as the tailwind buffeting the plane did not increase to 10 knots and the runway-braking action was not rated “poor” for the entire length of the runway, according to the NTSB investigation.
The tailwind was 8 to 9 knots when the plane landed, and the runway condition was rated “fair” on the first half of the runway and “poor” on the second half, officials said.
As the plane was on its final approach, Oliver told the captain: “We’re all counting on you.”
Sutherland laughed again and Oliver added: “Picked the wrong day to stop sniffin’ glue,” an apparent allusion to the 1980 film comedy “Airplane!”
“Yea,” said Sutherland.
But as they touched down, the tone of the transcripts changes drastically, the commentary replaced by a series of clipped exclamations and expletives:
“We ain’t goin’ man.”
“We’re [expletive].”
“We are [expletive].”
“All right, keep it straight.”
“Hang on.”
“Hang on.”
Sutherland told investigators that after the plane came to a stop he shut down the jet’s engines and that his top priority was evacuating the 98 passengers from the plane because flight attendants reported smelling leaking jet fuel.
In the tumult, the 59-year-old captain, who was a year away from the mandatory retirement age, recalled looking out the cockpit window and seeing a man with a bloody face holding a child in his arms.
Oliver, 34, saw the child move, which made him happy, Oliver later told investigators. But he suddenly realized there was still someone in the car.
Leroy Woods of Leroy, Ind., the man holding the child, was yelling at Sutherland to get the plane off of his other son, who was pinned inside the car.
Industry officials said that recreating and dissecting those painful moments, and all that led up to them, is crucial to ensuring it does not happen again.”The legacy of this must be to learn all we can to enhance aviation safety,” said Terry McVenes, an airline captain and air safety chairman at the Air Line Pilots Association.
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Southwest pilot: `We can’t do it.’
Excerpts from the cockpit voice-recorder transcripts of Southwest Airlines Flight 1248:
First Officer Steven Oliver: Field condition.
Captain Bruce Sutherland: Wet poor.
Oliver: Wow.
Sutherland: Can’t do it.
Oliver: I mean it’s [what is it] 30 feet at max braking.
Sutherland: I know.
Oliver: Know you’re good but. I mean that’s really tight. . . . And then you know what’s funny like if if you know we got we got that 30 feet of stopping MAX.
Sutherland: Ah ha.
Oliver: No procedure if that sucker fails when you touch down? We just go through the fence? We never talk about any of that stuff, ya know? Er if it fails on on landing?
Sutherland: Yeah.
Oliver: You do I tell you to go around? What you know what if it doesn’t there’s no guidance on it.
Oliver: I’m my butt’s gonna be squeezed so tight you never seen a butt squeezed tighter.
Sutherland: We got too much tailwind we can’t do it.
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jhilkevitch@tribune.com
