When preparing for any low-visibility landing, whether night VFR, day VMC in marginal conditions or an IMC arrival, there are a number of things to consider that will help you arrive safely. To compensate for obstructions to vision and avoid mistaking other surface objects for the airport, its best to visualize the runway environment as part of your approach or before-landing briefing. The last thing you want to do is mis-identify something on the ground as the runway or the runway environment, as had the crew of the 737. The runway itself may not contrast well with surrounding terrain cover, or be partly obstructed by trees or hills until youre nearly on top of it. With the rest of the windows opaque with ice. You may be trying to see through rivulets of rain streaming up your windscreen, or peering through a small rectangular “hot plate” windshield deicer You may be arriving at night or in reduced visibility, however, or popping out of the clouds and murk just a few hundred feet above ground near the runway threshold. If all our landings were on familiar runways in clear, bright daylight conditions, it would be much less important to think about what the runway will look like ahead of time. Ultimately, however, NTSB found the crews lack of approach planning, which among other things would have helped them visualize the type of approach lights to expect and when in the approach to expect them, was the probable cause of the crash. Controllers also failed to vector the aircraft onto the localizer outside the Final Approach Fix and “committed other errors in handling the flight,” according to NTSB, contributing to full-scale deflection of the localizer needle inside the FAF that called for a missed approach the crew did not make before impacting wires.įurther, an FAA inspector conducting an en route inspection of the flight from the 737s jump seat did not inform the crew of the errors they were committing in the planning and execution of the approach. For one, ATC failed to provide accurate weather information to the crew, which might have warned them not to expect visual contact with the runway environment while still more than a mile short of the threshold. The NTSB found several errors that contributed to the mishap. The crewĮxecuted a missed approach and recovered successfully at a former military airfield. The FOs callout influenced the captain to continue below minimums for the approach and into the power lines. The crew had been flying a Runway 27 localizer back course approach when the first officer misidentified street lights on a stretch of interstate highway along the east airport perimeter, thinking the lights were part of the runway environment. The Boeing 737 collided with 75-foot high electronic transmission cables, approximately 7000 feet short of the runway.
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