This month and next, more than 2,600 jetliners will thunder down the same runway by the Potomac, bound for the balmy Florida sunshine.
If you are on board one of them, escaping Washington in winter, take heart that your departure is far safer than it was 30 years ago Friday, when a combination of blunders catapulted a plane from that runway into the 14th Street bridge.
Videographer Chester Panzer talks about the footage he took of the rescue operation after Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge. Washington Post reporters Jura Koncius and Peter Perl, who covered the crash for the paper 30 years ago, reflect on the events that day.
How the Post covered the crash in 1982
The indelible chronicle of that snowy late afternoon began even as Air Florida Flight 90 sank into the Potomac. A TV crew that had been stuck in traffic jumped out to film the horror and the heroism for which the day is remembered.
The four people trapped by bridge traffic who died in their cars. The 74 crew members and passengers — three of them infants — killed in the crash. The passenger, Arland D. Williams Jr., who helped others escape the water and then was sucked under himself. And the bystander, Lenny Skutnik, who dived into the freezing water to save a drowning woman.
People who were touched by that day or caught up in the magnitude of the disaster will remember most of that. But 30 years after the fact, few people who cross the 14th Street bridge are aware that its formal name is the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge. And the 2.5 million people who take off from Reagan National Airport this winter will do so in the belief that the history of Jan. 13, 1982, can’t be repeated.
Experts say they’re right.
The lessons of that day and advances in training and technology over three decades have contributed to the safest era in aviation history. Although the skies are not risk-free, there hasn’t been a U.S. airline crash that killed more than 50 people since 2001.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators blamed the Flight 90 crash on a cockpit crew that didn’t de-ice the engines while awaiting takeoff and then relied on clearly dubious readings from instrument sensors that were clogged with ice.
The investigators said that although the captain, Larry Wheaton, and the co-pilot, Roger Alan Pettit, were cockpit veterans, they didn’t have much experience with winter weather. And they said that the plane sat on the taxiway too long, being pelted by snow and ice that fouled the critical leading edge of the wings and reduced the plane’s lift as it hurtled down a runway that ended at the Potomac.
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The captain of a plane that taxied past as Flight 90 readied for takeoff commented to his crew, “Look at the junk on that airplane.”
Later he recalled: “Almost the entire length of the fuselage had a mottled area of snow and what appeared to be ice . . . along the top and upper side of the fuselage above the passenger cabin windows.”
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There are at least three reasons that in 2012 your plane shouldn’t be covered with ice: better chemicals to keep the ice off, stricter regulations and better training for ground and cockpit crews.
“All three of those have evolved significantly over the last 30 years,” said Tom Hendricks, who flew for Delta Air Lines for 23 years before becoming senior vice president for safety, security and operations at Airlines for America, the trade group that until recently was known as the Air Transport Association.
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