Stephanie Manus had a bad feeling as Flight 1420 began its descent into Little Rock. “It felt and looked like we were in the eye of the storm,” she said. “I remember thinking we shouldn’t be landing.” Sitting in row 24 with her two young daughters, Lauren and Emily, Manus felt the plane buck wildly as it descended. Finally the MD-82 touched down and began to roll–and then the jet roared past the end of the runway and smashed into a landing-light platform. When the shattered fuselage stopped moving, stunned survivors began groping their way through the darkness to the emergency exits. “Please help me, I’ve got babies here!” Manus yelled. A stranger grabbed Lauren, and Manus, carrying Emily, followed him onto the wing. Outside, she and the others found themselves wading through marsh grass as the wreckage began to burn.
Inside the terminal, Jimmy Manus wondered what was taking them so long to get to the gate. He had watched the plane land–apparently safely–but that seemed like ages ago and there had been no announcements. Suddenly his cell phone rang. “We’re OK,” Stephanie said.
“What do you mean, you’re OK?” Jimmy said. “What happened?”
“The plane crashed,” she said. “I’m in a field with the girls. We’re OK.”
Amazingly, 136 of the 145 passengers and crew aboard American Airlines Flight 1420 lived to tell about their terrifying landing last Wednesday. The nine fatalities, however, include pilot Richard W. Buschmann, which means that investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board still don’t know what went wrong. The weather–a violent spring thunderstorm–was the prime suspect as NTSB experts began their work, and it undoubtedly was a contributing factor. According to Doppler radar data that was unavailable to flight controllers at the time, a storm cell packing 86-mph gusts hit the airport at almost the same moment that Buschmann and his copilot, Michael Origel, brought Flight 1420 down to Runway 4R.
But the explanation for the crash is almost certainly more complicated than that, and a NEWSWEEK source says pilot error is now the primary focus for investigators. Buschmann’s touchdown was on the money despite the wind and rain, which means Flight 1420’s real troubles began after it hit the ground. The flight-data recorder showed that the plane landed at normal speed but was still moving at nearly 90 mph at the end of the runway. Why couldn’t it stop? The data recorder shows that the spoilers–wing panels that act as air brakes–did not deploy at touchdown as they should have. That could mean Buschmann, a 20-year veteran who was one of American’s top pilots, somehow failed to arm the spoiler system. Copilot Origel, hospitalized with a broken leg, told investigators he believed Buschmann triggered the system when they ran through the landing checklist. So either Buschmann was careless or the system malfunctioned.
The larger question is why they tried to land at all. Little Rock tower warned Flight 1420 about thunderstorms over the area and radioed two separate warnings about 50-mph wind gusts at the airport. American Airlines will not comment on a pending investigation, but at a press conference, its chief pilot, Cecil Ewell, questioned the decision to land. “If somebody told me there were 50-knot gusts at the airport, I would be leaving town,” Ewell said. Fatigue may have been a factor; Buschmann and Origel were finishing a marathon workday that included more than 71/2 hours of flying time, minutes short of the legal limit. “Trying to beat a thunderstorm to an airport is like trying to beat a locomotive to a railroad crossing,” said former NTSB chairman James E. Burnett. “To try and do it at the end of a very long shift is really rolling the dice.” It was a gamble that led to tragedy.
