Southwest jet's speed, approach under scrutiny

Tuesday, March 7th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

News Investigators are trying to determine how fast Southwest Airlines Flight 1455 was traveling and where it landed on the runway Sunday night before it crashed through a fence and onto a busy street in Burbank, Calif.
The Boeing 737, carrying 137 passengers and five crew members, came to rest at a gas station across the street from the airport.

Four passengers were treated for minor injuries and 11 others reported scrapes and bruises from scrambling to escape from the first major accident in Dallas-based Southwest's 29-year history.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators said they would interview the pilots, study the skid marks on the runway at Burbank International Airport and analyze the twin-engine jetliner's flight recorders.

Southwest chairman Herb Kelleher said Monday that airline officials were grateful that the Dallas-based carrier had avoided a catastrophe.

"I'll be very honest. My feeling was, we were very fortunate that it wasn't worse than it was," Mr. Kelleher said. "I was very grateful for the outcome."

Though damage to the 15-year-old airplane could force Southwest to send it to the scrap pile, the accident does not mar the airline's record of more than 13 million flights without a fatality, Mr. Kelleher said. "As safety is defined, our leadership in the world continues," he said.

Investigators said Monday that they had conflicting reports about where the airplane touched down on the relatively short 6,000-foot runway. Several passengers reported that it landed as far as halfway down the runway, though other witnesses said it landed about 1,000 feet down the runway, where it should have.

Initial reports indicated the runway may have been wet, which would have affected braking, but officials said Monday that the rain had stopped more than four hours before the crash.

Mr. Kelleher said another Southwest flight landed without trouble two minutes before Flight 1455 arrived.

Passenger Kevin McCoy, a business executive from Los Angeles, said the airplane came down "so fast and so steep. I never had experienced an approach like that."

Mr. McCoy, who regularly travels from the Burbank airport, said he thinks the airplane landed hard and was traveling faster than normal. "We were really cruising," he said.

Aviation experts said it is too early to begin pointing fingers, but they say that similar accidents have been blamed on the pilots.

"Landing too far down a short runway is a pilot performance problem," said James E. Burnett Jr., an aviation safety consultant and former chairman of the safety board.

Delay a factor?

Flight 1455 was delayed for two hours in Las Vegas by bad weather, raising questions about whether the pilots may have been reluctant to go around for another landing.

"Nobody likes to go around," Mr. Burnett said. "But there is also a saying that one of the most useless things in aviation is runway behind you."

Sources close to the investigation said that safety board officials will be interested in determining what role, if any, a sophisticated landing aide commonly found in fighter jets played in the accident. Southwest was the first major carrier to install "heads-up displays" on the dashboard in front of the captain's seat on most of its jets.

The heads-up display allows the pilot to see an electronic image of the runway superimposed over the view of the actual runway. Throughout a normal approach, it shows exactly where the airplane will touch down for the speed it is traveling.

Several Southwest pilots said Monday that they routinely use the heads-up display while landing, particularly at night and in bad weather.

"It removes the guesswork," said one pilot who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If you follow the heads-up display, it takes you right where you need to be."

Role unknown

Officials said Monday that they are not sure whether the heads-up display was used during the landing at Burbank, or if the captain was even flying the aircraft. The co-pilot does not have a heads-up display and cannot see through the captain's. Investigators say the device will do little to help reconstruct what happened because it does not record information.

Mr. Kelleher said he had not talked to either of the pilots and had not heard whether they had described what happened.

"Right now we have no reason to criticize any action or behavior of the pilots in any way, shape or form," Mr. Kelleher said.

He said the trip to Burbank was the first flight of the day for both cockpit crew members after at least four days off.

The captain, whom Mr. Kelleher refused to identify, has been employed by Southwest since 1988 and has accumulated 18,000 total flight hours. He has flown 737s since 1980. The co-pilot was hired in 1996 and has been flying for 15 years. Southwest officials did not say how many flight hours he had.

This was the second crash in a year in which a jetliner went off a runway that did not have a 1,000-foot safety zone at the end.

Last June, American Airlines Flight 1420 landed during a thunderstorm in Little Rock, Ark., and slid 5,000 feet before hurtling over an embankment and breaking apart. Eleven people, including the captain, were killed.

The Little Rock airport was exempted from the FAA's minimum standards for the safety zone because the end of the runway is adjacent to the Arkansas River.

Tight space

FAA officials said Monday that the Burbank airport had been "grandfathered in" when the standards were written because it had been operating for decades as a downtown commercial airport. The road that Flight 1455 crashed into when it broke through a metal blast fence is less than 50 feet from the end of the runway.

Mr. Kelleher said the airline serves only FAA-certified airports and noted that many of the downtown and older airports that Southwest uses do not have large safety areas.

Sunday's crash landing focused new attention on a planned expansion of the Burbank airport. The project, however, does not call for lengthening the two runways. It primarily involves relocating and enlarging the passenger terminal.

Airport officials say the 70-year-old building is dangerously close to the runways - 313 feet from the east-west strip, which is nearest the terminal. FAA design standards require a 750-foot separation.

Burbank Airport Authority spokesman Victor Gill said the expansion would increase the buffer zone between the runways and the terminal. That would give pilots more room to maneuver in some emergencies, although not necessarily in an incident similar to Sunday's, he said.

"The same runway would have been in place," Mr. Gill said.

The east-west runway is 6,032 feet; the north-south one, 6,886 feet.

"They're short, but not prohibitively short," said Mr. Gill. He noted that the single runway at John Wayne Airport in nearby Orange County is 5,700 feet.

He also said the Burbank field is bordered on all sides by major streets and busy railroad lines, leaving little space for longer runways.

Staff writer Paul Pringle in Los Angeles contributed to this report.