Pilots are now trained to use “holdover” tables that dictate how long they can remain on the ground after anti-icing fluid is applied.
“You’ve got to be airborne by that time, or you come back and you start the whole thing over again,” Hendricks said. “It’s incredibly structured. It used to not be that way. It’s very checklist-oriented. Pilots are highly trained in it.”
The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a series of regulations and directives since the 1980s governing use of de-icing fluids and training for pilots and ground crews. The most recent, released in August, requires that planes with de-icing systems be equipped with automatic cockpit alerts and that smaller commercial planes be retrofitted with ice-detection systems.
* * *
Conversation from the cockpit as Air Florida begins takeoff:
Co-pilot, watching instruments: “God, look at that thing. That don’t seem right, does it? Uh, that’s not right.”
Pilot: “Yes it is; there’s 80.”
Co-pilot: “Naw, I don’t think that’s right. Ah, maybe it is. . . .”
* * *
Thirty years later, few of the 26,000 passengers who take off from National on a typical day remember the details of the Flight 90 crash. But the people flying their planes do.
“Within the air crew world, this is a well-known accident,” said Jim Hookey, the resident expert on jet engines at the NTSB.
It was not the weight of the ice, the wait to takeoff or the slush on the runway that caused the plane to crash. For reasons no one will ever know, two pilots with little experience in winter weather failed to turn on heating systems that keep the idling jet engines warm.
Without that heat, something — almost certainly ice — clogged engine openings that are essential to determining how much thrust those engines are generating. As a result, the cockpit instruments told the pilots that the engines were generating far more power than they really were.
Because of those bad readings, when the plane failed to gain altitude, the pilots didn’t realize that throwing the throttle open would give them more lift.
“Up to about eight or 10 seconds before they hit the bridge, if they had just pushed the throttle [wide open], they probably would have buzzed the bridge, but they would have made it,” Hookey said.
That lesson, he said, has been learned throughout the industry.
“Crews now are not hesitant to jam the throttle to save the plane,” Hookey said. “There’s probably been a lot of airplanes that have been saved because of the errors that these guys made.”
* * *
Conversation in the cockpit as Air Florida struggles to get airborne:
Pilot: “Come on forward . . . forward, just barely climb. . . . Stalling, we’re falling!”
Co-pilot: “Larry, we’re going down, Larry . . .”
Pilot: “I know it.”
[Sound of impact.]
* * *
A driver stuck in traffic on the northbound 14th Street bridge:
“I heard screaming jet engines. . . . It was like the pilot was still trying to climb, but the plane was sinking fast. I saw the tail of the plane tear across the top of the cars, smashing some tops and ripping off others. . . . Once the tail was across the bridge, the plane seemed to continue sinking very fast, but I don’t recall the nose pointing down. . . . I saw the cockpit go under the ice. I got the impression it was skimming under the ice and water.”
* * *
Rescue crews and ambulances struggled through traffic to reach the scene on that snowy afternoon. The federal government had released its employees early, and roads were jammed. Then came word about 30 minutes later that a crowded Orange Line train had slammed into a concrete pillar near the Smithsonian station.
The first fatal accident in the history of Metro would injure 25 passengers and kill three others.
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