Southwest Airlines Capt. Bruce Sutherland couldn’t see the touchdown markings on the snowy runway at Midway on Dec. 8, and his plane was skidding toward the end of a landing strip that was, to him, a “black hole.”
“Come on, baby … Son of a [bleep],” the captain blurted out, according to cockpit transcripts released Tuesday.
“Jump on the brakes, are ya?” First Officer Steven Oliver yelled back.
“Oh, no, a car,” Sutherland shouted after Flight 1248 overran the runway.
The Boeing 737-700 rolled through two fences and landed on top of a car on Central Avenue, crushing and killing Joshua Woods, 6.
As National Transportation Safety Board officials opened a two-day fact-finding hearing Tuesday, they focused on a series of events and decisions that broke the aviation safety chain, standards and procedures designed to prevent a single misstep from causing disaster.
The pilots considered diverting the flight to St. Louis or Kansas City, Mo., and at several points seemed to rule out the idea of trying to land at Midway. But after each moment of reconsideration, they continued toward Chicago, apparently willing to put off the final decision.
The onboard flight computer calculated that the plane would come to a stop with only 30 feet of runway to spare, based on the assumption that the runway condition was poor, as some pilots reported earlier.
Sutherland and Oliver apparently mistakenly thought they had a larger buffer of runway. They thought that thrust-reversers would slow the aircraft more quickly than the computer indicated, officials said. But Southwest programs its 737-700 computers to account for the thrust-reversers.
In any event, the thrust-reversers were of minimum assistance on Flight 1248, NTSB investigator-in-charge Robert Benzon told the hearing.
Sutherland experienced problems lifting the reverse-thruster levers. Oliver finally deployed the devices, but the full effect of reverse thrust was not obtained until 27 seconds after the plane touched down, Benzon said. The plane skidded off the runway about seven seconds later.
The possibility of that outcome had occurred to the pilots earlier in the flight, as they were discussing using an unfamiliar automatic braking system for the first time, the transcripts show.
While a strong drive to complete a mission has been identified as a contributing factor in some aviation accidents, Sutherland told investigators that he did not feel any pressure from Southwest to complete the flight to Chicago.
As the snowstorm intensified, co-pilot Oliver made an announcement that the plane would be on the ground in about 25 minutes, telling passengers “we’re gonna get you safely on your way.”
But in the seclusion of the cockpit, the two pilots repeatedly discussed the messy runway conditions at Midway. The pilots were aware that another Southwest plane landed on the same Midway runway nine minutes before they did.
But they did not know that just a few minutes later, before Flight 1248’s landing, a different Southwest flight crew didn’t like what they saw at Midway and decided to fly to St. Louis.
Sutherland told investigators that after the plane came to a stop, he shut down the jet’s engines and that his top priority was evacuating the 98 passengers from the plane because flight attendants reported smelling leaking jet fuel.
In the tumult, the 59-year-old captain, who was a year away from the mandatory retirement age, recalled looking out the cockpit window and seeing a man with a bloody face holding a child.
Oliver, 34, saw the child move, which made him happy, Oliver later told investigators. But he suddenly realized there still was someone in the car.
Leroy Woods, the man holding the child, was yelling at Sutherland to get the plane off of his other son, who was pinned inside the car.
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Jet pilot: ‘Can’t do it’
Excerpts from the voice-recorder transcripts of Southwest Airlines Flight 1248:
First Officer Steven Oliver: Field condition.
Capt. Bruce Sutherland: Wet poor.
Oliver: Wow.
Sutherland: Can’t do it.
Oliver: I mean it’s [what is it] 30 feet at max braking.
Sutherland: I know.
Oliver: Know you’re good but … I mean that’s really tight. And then you know what’s funny like if, if you know we got, we got that 30 feet of stopping MAX.
Sutherland: Ah ha.
Oliver: No procedure if that sucker fails when you touch down? We just go through the fence? We never talk about any of that stuff, ya know? Or if it fails on landing?
Sutherland: Yeah.
Oliver: You do … I tell you to go around? What you know, what if it doesn’t there’s no guidance on it.
Oliver: I’m … my butt’s gonna be squeezed so tight you never seen a butt squeezed tighter.
Sutherland: We got too much tailwind, we can’t do it.
