Analysis Of The Southwest Airlines Flight 1248

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THE EVENT SUMMARY

The Southwest Airlines flight 1248 from Thurgood Marshall Airport, Baltimore to Chicago’s Midway International Airport was a scheduled passenger flight. On the day of 8th Dec, 2005, Boeing 737-700 carrying 98 passengers and 5 crew members on board overran while landing on a heavy snowstorm day in Chicago. The aircraft skidded off the runway and crashed into a car on the nearby street killing a 5 year old boy and injuring 4 people on ground and 18 passengers onboard.

WEATHER CONDITIONS

The snowstorm attacked northeast Illinois

covering upto 25.4 cms in the parts of the

Chicago metropolitan area. It was observed

that visibility at the airport was occasionally

reduced to 0.2 km in part due to large snow

flakes. Pilots were advised to enter into holding

pattern while runway clearing snowplow

operations were in progress. METAR reported

winds at 110 degrees at 11knots, visibility

½ statute mile, cloud ceiling 400 feet and

runway 31C RVR 4500 feet (Wilson, n.d.).

The design of the aircraft permits safe landing in maximum of 10knots of tailwind component. This was further restricted by Southwest’s company policies and flight operations manual which allow Pilots with no more than 5 knots of tailwind to land with. From the data it can be noted at the time of accident, tail winds were ranging between 8knots.

OBSERVATIONS

The plane touched down 2000 feet into the runway and it was believed that Pilot did not deploy the thrust reversers till 18 seconds after touchdown which was way too late and by that time, the aircraft was only 1000 feet away from the end of the runway and it was likely to smash into the fence. Reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) showed the Southwest Airlines jet had...

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...as Engineered material arresting system (EMAS). This system requires a lot less space and gives the same level of benefit which RESA provides. There are many cases where EMAS has decelerated the aircraft and helped the aircraft avoid the potential crash. To get further understanding of the use of EMAS, a list of few more incidents where EMAS safely stopped the overrunning aircrafts is mentioned below:

> July 2006, A Mystere Falcon 900 overran the runway at Greenville Downtown Airport in South Carolina

> July 2008, An Airbus A320 overran the runway at ORD

> January 2010, A Bombardier CRJ-200 regional jet overran the runway at Yeager Airport in Charleston, WVA

> October 2013, A Cessna 680 Citation overran the runway at Palm Beach International in West Palm Beach, FL

-EMAS is being built at Trenton-Mercer Airport- September 2012- Photo credits- the times of Trenton

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