Jetliner coming in too steep before touchdown, pilot warned to ‘pull up’

Jeff Wilson

Tuesday, March 7, 2000 | 3:40 a.m.

BURBANK, Calif. - A cockpit warning system barked "pull up" to a Southwest Airlines pilot during a steep landing at Burbank Airport in the seconds before the plane shot off a runway, federal investigators said Tuesday.

Engines remained at low or idle power settings through Sunday's descent from 3,000 feet at an angle in excess of 6 degrees, National Transportation Safety Board chairman Jim Hall said in a statement released in Washington.

The flight path angle for Runway 8 at the airport is 3 degrees, the NTSB said after preliminary review of cockpit voice recordings, flight data recordings, radar data and interviews with air traffic controllers.

"That's fairly steep. It's about like a (aircraft) carrier landing," said Bill Waldock, associate director for the Center for Aerospace Safety Education at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz.

"If they were coming in at a 6-degree angle, there was something wrong with the approach," Waldock said.

A 7 mph tailwind may also have increased the aircraft's speed, he said.

During final descent, the pilots heard "sink rate" and "pull up" commands from the plane's ground proxmity warning system, the NTSB said.

The pilots were interviewed Tuesday by NTSB investigators.

The plane's flight data recorder showed the Boeing 737-300, carrying 142 people on a flight from Las Vegas, touched down at 208 mph and crashed 20 seconds later into end-of-runway fences. Impact was at 37 mph.

The jetliner then burst onto Hollywood Way, a main thoroughfare, struck a car and screeched to a halt just 39 feet from pumps at a Chevron gas station. There were 15 minor injuries.

Air traffic controllers said Southwest Flight 1455 landed too far down the runway, an unidentified Federal Aviation Administration spokesman told USA Today.

FAA regional spokesman Mitch Barker declined comment, saying the FAA source "was trying to be helpful" and was "speaking out of turn." Barker referred all inquiries to the NTSB.

"That's still under investigation," NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said in Washington.

The crash reinvigorated the long-running battle over Burbank Airport expansion, especially relocation of the airport terminal. Burbank Airport serves 4.7 million passengers annually.

"The notion that there's not a safety problem at this airport vanished," said Carl Meseck, chairman of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority Commission.

The 70-year-old airport terminal is just 313 feet from the center of the 6,032-foot east-west runway the jetliner landed on. FAA standards now call for terminals to be at least 750 feet away.

"We all need to sit down and see how we can move the relocation forward. It's a huge safety issue," Mayor Stacey Murphy said.

But the length of the runways won't change under proposed upgrades and they will do nothing to prevent similar accidents, expansion foe and former Councilman Ted McConkey said.

The FAA recommended in 1980 that the terminal be moved, but renovation plans were stalled for years by homeowner groups and Burbank officials who feared a new terminal would mean more flights.

NTSB investigators interviewed the crew of a plane that landed shortly before the runaway Southwest flight and they reported a dry runway and good braking action.

In Washington on Tuesday, Southwest Airlines chief Herb Kelleher said the company will correct any safety defects uncovered in the investigation of the worst accident in the carrier's 29-year history.

But Kelleher, who was in the nation's capital attending the FAA's annual Aviation Forecast Conference, warned about speculating before the facts are in. He said the airline has "no idea" what caused the accident, and he noted that NTSB investigators might be months away from determining a probable cause.

"You can rest assured that Southwest Airlines, which has operated more flights and carried more persons than any other airline in the world, will rectify any faults that are found," he said.

Kelleher said it would be "feckless and foolish" to change the airline's operating procedures involving takeoffs and landings without knowing the cause of the accident.