Seconds after Southwest Airlines Flight 1919 landed on a rain-soaked Midway Airport runway Tuesday afternoon, Charles Moelter could feel the plane lurching as it fishtailed off the tarmac and into a mud patch.
“There was so much water on that runway, and this guy (the pilot) could not stop the plane. It was like holy … what’s going on,” said Moelter, 55. “It was like landing in a lake, you could feel it.”
Moelter, who was coming home to Oak Park after visiting family in Denver, said the ground underneath him felt like a “really bad bumpy street.”
“That pilot saved us; if he would have landed another two or three seconds down the runway, we would have been all over Cicero Avenue,” he said.
Moelter was one of the 134 passengers who were on the flight when the Boeing 737-700 landed at 1:35 p.m. and slid off the left edge near the end of the runway. No injuries were reported on the plane, which also carried five crew members.
The plane came to rest on a grassy area near 63rd Street and Cicero Avenue about 150 feet from a wall separating the airport grounds from the street, with the nose pointed directly at a White Castle drive-thru across Cicero, officials said.
A Southwest Airlines spokeswoman said the airline will work with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate the incident.
