By Sadef Ali Kully
The cockpit crew from Delta flight 1086 that skidded off the runway at LaGuardia airport March 5 told investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board that they had difficulty with the brakes during landing when the runway was covered with snow.
The NTSB interviewed the flight crew on Saturday in Atlanta, Ga. The crew said they decided to land based on “good” braking action reports received from air traffic control but the runway appeared all white moments before landing, according to a preliminary investigation report from the NTSB. The automatic spoilers did not deploy, but the first officer quickly deployed them manually; the auto brakes were set to ‘max’ but that the pilots did not sense any wheel brake deceleration; and the captain reported that he was unable to prevent the airplane from drifting left, the report said.
“We don’t like to speculate in investigations. We are going to let the facts drive us to the right conclusion,” said Kelly Nantell, spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board., which conducts accident investigations.
Investigation procedures include detailed photographs of the incident, the cockpit voice recorder, before take-off ground reports, flight data recorder, engineering reports, passenger testimoney, as well as testimony from the pilot and inflight crew, according to the NTSB.
The cockpit voice recorder was downloaded and contains two hours of good quality recordings and captured the entire flight. The flight date recorder, also downloaded, is a 25 hour tape-based recorder which captured information on flight data such as airspeed, altitude, heading and information on engines and flight controls.
An NTSB air traffic control specialist found that three minutes prior to Delta flight 1086 landing air traffic controllers relayed the braking action reports to the flight crew of 1086, which were based on pilot reports from two other flights that landed several minutes prior to flight 1086. Both earlier flights reported the breaking action on the runway as “good.”
During a news conference on the day of the incident, Port Authority spokesman Pat Foye said the “runway had been plowed minutes before” the crash and two planes had landed safely several minutes beforehand. The passengers slid down the plane’s emergency slides, then were put on a shuttle bus and taken to the Delta terminal, where they were checked out by paramedics, a Port Authority source said.
All 125 passengers and five crew members were taken off plane and minor injuries of over a dozen passengers were reported to the Port Authority. Multiple emergency rescue crews were on the scene.
The Delta Airline flight 1086, which originated in Atlanta, used a McDonnell-Douglas MD-88 twin-engine aircraft that can seat 149 passengers.
Reach Reporter Sadef Ali Kully by e-mail at skull
