Chicago – Investigators studied the crash scene today after a Southwest Airlines jet trying to land amid heavy snow plowed off a Midway International Airport runway and into a street, killing a 6-year-old boy in a car.
Ten other people, most of them on the ground, were injured in the Thursday evening accident, authorities said. The accident, the first fatal one in Southwest’s history, closed the airport overnight but it reopened at 6 a.m., Aviation Department spokeswoman Wendy Abrams said.
Flight data and cockpit voice recorders were removed from the plane and were being sent to Washington for analysis, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator said today.
Flight 1248 from Baltimore with more than 100 people aboard touched down around 7:15 p.m. Thursday. Though the airport had about 7 inches of snow, aviation officials said conditions at the time were acceptable.
The plane went off the end of the runway and slammed through a fence before it struck two vehicles, pinning one beneath it. The boy who died, one of five people in the pinned car, was identified as Joshua Woods of Leroy, Ind., said Sandra Flowers of the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.
Passenger Mike Abate, 35, of suburban Milwaukee, said he could see from the plane that a man was carrying an injured child and that other people were taken away in an ambulance.
“We were safe on the plane,” Abate said. “The toughest part was to realize that someone was under the belly of the plane.” The Boeing 737, nose resting on the ground, and the vehicles remained in the street this morning. NTSB investigators were on scene.
In a briefing, NTSB board member Ellen Engleman Conners stressed that a variety of factors need to be looked at before any cause is determined.
“Often, the first guess is not correct,” Conners said. “So, we’re not going to guess. We’re going to focus on facts and science and data.” Among other things, routine toxicology tests on the pilots were planned, she said.
Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said this morning it was the first fatal accident involving a Southwest flight in the discount carrier’s 35-year history.
“There are no indications that there are any maintenance problems with that aircraft whatsoever,” Kelly said. He said the plane had a service check Wednesday in Phoenix.
Five crew and 98 passengers were aboard the plane, authorities said. Most were evacuated through the plane’s inflatable slides in blowing snow, while others used stairs at the rear of the plane, said Chicago Fire Department Spokesman Larry Langford.
The airport, surrounded by homes and businesses, has shorter runways than most major airports, because it was originally built to handle smaller propeller planes. The larger ones land at O’Hare International.
Two people remained hospitalized at midmorning today, including one of the people in the car with Joshua. That person’s condition was withheld at the request of family, Advocate Christ Medical Center said. A second person, in the other car that was hit, was in good condition at Holy Cross Hospital. Two passengers on the plane and six other people in the two cars were treated and released.
Terry McVenes, chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association’s safety committee, said the weather will be only one factor investigators will examine.
“They’ll look at the weather, they’ll look at the runway conditions, they’ll look at the profile of the airplane both on approach and landing,” McVenes said. “They’ll take a look at everything and figure it out.” In February, a corporate jet skidded off a runway while taking off at Teterboro, N.J., crossed a highway and slammed into a warehouse. No one was killed, but a passenger in a car that was struck was critically injured.
A transportation measure signed recently by President Bush will require hundreds of airports to improve the safety margin at the end of runways by 2015.
The Midway accident happened 33 years to the day after a crash of a plane approaching the airport killed 45 people, two of them on the ground. Eighteen other passengers survived. Among the dead were Dorothy Hunt, the wife of Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt, and CBS newswoman Michele Clark.
