1985 — Aug 2, Delta Flight 191 Wind Shear Crash, Dallas-Fort Worth IAP, TX — 137
–137 Associated Press. “Air Crashes In the U.S. Since 1979, July 20, 1989.
–137 Darby. “Cracking the Microburst Code.” AeroSafety World, March 2011, p. 54.
–137 Smith, Mike. “Defeating the downburst: 20 years since last…” Washington Post, 7-2-2014
–137 Torbenson, Eric. “1985 Delta 191 disaster at D/FW…” Dallas Morning News Aug 2010.
–137 United Press International. “Delta Crash Toll Hits 137.” Sun-Sentinel, 10-4-1985.[1]
–135 History.com. This Day in History, Disaster, August 2, 1985. Sudden Thunderstorm…
–135 NTSB. Aircraft Accident Report (NTSB/AAR-86/05). Delta Air Lines, Inc…, 1986.[2]
–135 Sanders. The Management of Losses Arising from Extreme Events. 2002, 178.
Narrative Information
Darby: “The issue of downbursts and microbursts received renewed attention 10 years later[3] with the fatal accident involving Delta Air Lines Flight 191 at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in August 1985. Flight 191, a Lockheed l-1011, was on final approach. The cockpit voice recorder recorded the first officer, the pilot flying, saying, ‘Stuff is moving in.’ The captain, the monitoring pilot, radioed to the tower, ‘Delta One-Ninety-One heavy, out here in the rain. Feels good.’
“Smith says[4] ‘Now under the cloud base, the crew could see what appeared to be a light rain shower between them and the runway. Other planes were flying through the shower and landing normally. But once Delta 191 entered the rain shower, all hell broke loose.’ Soon the ground-proximity warning system was generating its ‘whoop whoop pull up’ automated voice message. The captain called for a go-around, but it was too late to avert the accident. The aircraft touched down a mile short of the runway, bounced, touched down three more times, skidded, and struck a large water storage tank. The jet fuel ignited. ‘The microburst, a phenomenon that many meteorologists said did not exist, had claimed another commercial jetliner and 137 lives,’ says Smith. He notes that airport weather instruments measured winds gusting to 100 mph (161 kph) at the eastern runways while the west side runways were dry, with partial sunshine.
“Once again, [meteorologist Ted] Fujita was invited to investigate the accident. Smith says, ‘Fujita himself flew over the airport, surveyed the on-site instrumentation from a cherry picker {boom lift}, photographed the exact location of the anemometer {wind speed sensor} and wind vane, and collected every scrap of data he could. With Fujita, one never knew which type of data might turn out to be crucial. ‘In addition to the data collected by the instrumentation at the airport, Fujita collected weather satellite imagery, radar data, eyewitness reports, and data from the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. Once he had all of the date, he began to weave it into a coherent picture.’
“As Smith describes it, the picture looked like this:
As the L-1011 neared the north end of the runway, it gradually slowed and descended along the glideslope. When the plane initially encountered the microburst, the leading edge of the wind struck the aircraft…Delta 191 encountered high winds and rising air. This increased the speed of the aircraft and lifted it above the descending trajectory it was supposed to follow.
This is where the insidious nature of the microburst presents itself. Almost instantly, the place went from being too high to nose-diving toward the ground. As it reached the south half of the microburst, the wind direction shifted from out of the south (a headwind) to the north (a tailwind), causing an instant drop in airspeed and even more sink.
“The book devotes a chapter about the controversy – including a lawsuit brought by the captain’s widow against the FAA and the National Weather Service (NWS) – to why Flight 191 was flying an approach in a thunder-storm at all when ‘just about everyone on the east side of the airport – traffic controllers, pilots preparing to take off, the crew of Delta 191 and the airport weather observer – had all seen the storm.’
“The NWS was legally charged with the responsibility for providing weather information to the FAA, which in turn passed it on to controllers and pilots. Smith says that the hand-off worked better in theory than in practice at the time.
“National weather radar charts were sent from Kansas City, Missouri, but were not received by airports or air traffic controllers until nearly an hour after the radar observations had been made, a delay that can be like a century for aviation purposes. Local NWS radar facilities were often located not only outside airports, but outside the cities they served, to provide better advance warning of approaching storms and reduce clutter on the radar screens. The NWS radar for the Dallas-Fort Worth area was in Stephenville, about 50 mi (80 km) from the airport. ‘The data from that radar {were] fed to two NWS facilities in Fort Worth: the Fort Worth forecast office, located in the federal building downtown, and the NWS Center Weather Service Unit (CWSU) inside the FAA’s air route traffic control enter near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport,’ Smith says.
“Among other problems, ‘the NWS radar technician in Stephenville was at dinner, away from the radar console, when the microburst-producing thunderstorm developed just north of Dallas/Fort Worth International {Airport}. Right after he finished eating, he helped launch the evening weather balloon, leaving the radar still unmanned. He did not return to the radar until 6:00 p.m. At 6:04, two minutes before the crash, he telephoned the Fort Worth downtown office to inform it of the storm near the airport. The 6:04 p.m. call came too late to allow a warning to have been issued because…it took the NWS office six to 10 minutes to prepare an aviation weather warning for the Dallas/Fort Worth control tower.’
“In short, ‘there was…no real mechanism to instantly convey a threat directly to aircraft,’ Smith says. ‘This faulty system is one that continues, to some extent, even today’.” (Darby. “Cracking the Microburst Code.” AeroSafety World, March 2011, pp. 53-55.)
History.com: “On this day in 1985, strong and sudden wind gusts cause a plane crash at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport in Texas that kills 135 people. The rapid and unexpected formation of a supercell, an extremely violent form of thunderstorm, led to the tragedy.
“Delta Flight 191 left Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the afternoon, headed for Dallas, Texas. The passengers aboard the Lockheed L-1011 enjoyed a completely normal flight until they approached the Dallas area. Summer afternoons in central Texas often include thunderstorms and August 2 proved to be a typical day in this respect. Flight 191 moved around a large storm on its original flight path and ended up coming in due south toward runway 17.
“The crew of 191 saw lightning north of the airport, but did not abort the landing. As the plane flew into strong headwinds, the pilot slowed the thrust, expecting an updraft to hold the plane’s altitude. Instead, there was a sudden downward wind shear, with a blast of wind from the tail. The Lockheed plane is relatively heavy and was not able to thrust quickly in response. The pilot lost control of the plane and it hit the ground 6,000 feet short of the runway.
“The plane hit a car, killing the driver, and then skidded into two water tanks. One hundred thirty-five people lost their lives and another 15 suffered serious injury in the crash. The subsequent investigation revealed that the weather had changed drastically in the eight minutes prior to the crash. A fast-growing supercell formation had caused unpredictable winds. The pilots also should have been more prudent, given what they could see of the developing storm as they approached the airport.
“Today, improvements in technology help to monitor the progression and location of storms like the one that downed Flight 191.” (History.com. This Day in History…, Aug 2, 1985. “Sudden Thunderstorm Causes Plane Crash.”)
Magnuson: “As Delta Air Lines Flight 191, a wide-bodied Lockheed L-1011 with 160 aboard, approached Dallas/Fort Worth Airport last Friday, the north Texas sky abruptly turned dark gray. Clouds welled up and burst into showers, and lightning bolts zigzagged menacingly. A meteorologist later estimated that a downdraft was rushing through the thunderstorm cell at 80 m.p.h. The huge plane descended, but suddenly plunged belly first to the ground a mile north of Runway 17 at the nation’s largest airport (roughly the size of Manhattan). The L-1011 bounced off the turf and came down again a quarter-mile away, grazing one car on busy State Highway 114 and demolishing a second car, whose driver was decapitated. The plane skipped across a grassy field, ricocheted off a water tower, then burst into flames as it slid across the tarmac. “It was like a wall of napalm,” said Airline Mechanic Jerry Maximoff. The tail section, with one of the plane’s three engines and the last ten rows of seats, was the only recognizable part of the wreckage.
“Somehow 31 people, including three flight attendants, initially survived the impact and subsequent inferno. “It was all sunshine until we actually started coming down,” said Jay Slusher, 33, a computer programmer who was going to catch another plane for his home in Phoenix.
“Then the rain started, very heavy. It became so dark you couldn’t even see out the windows. The ride got rougher and rougher. It seemed like there was something on top of the plane, pushing it to the ground. The pilot tried to pull out of it. The speed of the engines increased. We started rocking back and forth. Then we were tossed all around. I saw an orange streak coming toward me on the left side of the floor. I thought we were going to explode. At that point, I said, ‘Well, it’s all over.’ The next thing that happened is that I ended up sitting in my seat on my side. I looked up and I could see the grass. I said, ‘Thank you, Lord,’ unbuckled my seat belt and jumped out.”
“….Rescue workers toiled at first in a nearly horizontal driving rain. They placed yellow sheets over the dead, quickly assessed the severity of survivors’ injuries and warned area hospitals by radio about what type of cases to expect. The Rev. Richard Brown, who was giving last rites to the victims, was startled when he saw the stomach of one, a baby, “going up and down.” He baptized the infant instead and alerted medics, but the child later died. Most of the injured were taken by helicopter or ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where doctors had tried to save John F. Kennedy in 1963. Officials were heartened by the local response to appeals for blood donations. Some 1,500 people lined up to give.
“As night fell, a large crane lifted pieces of wreckage in the search for bodies. Four were found under the landing gear. Floodlights illuminated the scene, which included the grotesque sight of corpses being loaded into refrigerator trucks labeled LIVE MAINE LOBSTERS. All three members of the cockpit crew were killed. The pilot, Captain Ted Connors, 57, had flown for Delta for 31 years. One passenger survived because she made a lucky decision. Assigned a front seat before takeoff from Fort Lauderdale, Annie Edwards, of Pompano Beach, Fla., shifted to a rear seat beside a friend, Juanita Williams. Both survived. They were among a group of women going to Dallas to attend a convention of Delta Sigma Theta, a sorority. Other passengers were heading for Los Angeles, the flight’s last stop. Friends checking the arrivals list there found a curt message: “Flight 191. See agent.”
“The weather is expected to be the main focus of National Transportation Safety Board investigators, who rushed to Dallas to seek the cause of the accident. While some witnesses reported that lightning had struck Flight 191, a board spokesman doubted that this would have caused the crash. “Lightning doesn’t normally take an airplane down,” he said. “It hasn’t happened in many, many years.”
“The more likely suspect is wind shear, a collision or crossing of high-velocity winds, often during thunderstorms. Since the winds can shift from head to tail almost instantaneously, the condition is nearly impossible for a pilot to handle at relatively slow takeoff and landing speeds. Recent studies have cited wind shear as a factor in at least 27 commercial aircraft accidents since 1964. The most notable: an Eastern Airlines 727 crash on landing at New York’s JFK Airport in 1975 that killed 113, and a Pan American 727 accident after takeoff from New Orleans in 1982 that left 153 dead. President Reagan was in Air Force One in August 1983 when it landed at Maryland’s Andrews Air Force Base moments before wind shear flattened trees at the airfield.
“Dallas/Fort Worth is one of about 100 U.S. airports with a special array of anemometers to detect dangerous swirling winds near ground level. Investigators will be trying to determine what the sensors recorded just before Flight 191 made its approach, and if the readings were ominous, why the pilot was not warned. –By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Jerome Chandler and David S. Jackson/Dallas.” (Magnuson, Ed. “Like a Wall of Napalm.” Time, April 18, 2005.)
National Transportation Safety Board: “Synopsis
“On August 2, 1985, at 1805:52 central daylight time, Delta Air Lines flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011-385-1, N726DA, crashed while approaching to land on runway 17L at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Texas. While passing through the rain shaft beneath a thunderstorm, flight 191 entered a microburst which the pilot was unable to traverse successfully. The airplane struck the ground about 6,300 feet north of the approach end of runway 17L, hit a car on a highway north of the runway killing the driver, struck two water tanks on the airport, and broke apart. Except for a section of the airplane containing the aft fuselage and empennage, the remainder of the airplane disintegrated during the impact sequence, and a severe fire erupted during the impact sequence. Of the 163 persons aboard, 134 passengers and crewmembers were killed; 26 passengers and 3 cabin attendants survived.
“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable causes of the accident were the flightcrew’s decision to initiate and continue the approach into a cumulonimbus cloud which they observed to contain visible lightning; the lack of specific guidelines, procedures, and training for avoiding and escaping from low-altitude windshear; and the lack of definitive, real-time windshear hazard information. This resulted in the aircraft’s encounter at low altitude with a microburst-induced, severe windshear from a rapidly developing thunderstorm located on the final approach course.” (NTSB 1986, p. 1.)
Smith: “….On August 2, 1985, a Delta Airlines jumbo jet was on approach to Dallas Ft. Worth International Airport while the three pilots in the cockpit discussed the lightning “right ahead of us.” The Lockheed L-1011 aircraft penetrated the thunderstorm and was violently tossed by the wind. The plane slammed into a water tank at the airport. The crash of Delta Flight 191 caused the deaths of 137 people and injuries to 28.” (Smith, Mike. “Defeating the downburst: 20 years since last U.S. commercial jet accident from wind shear.” Washington Post, 7-2-2014.)
Torbenson: “Twenty-five years after Delta Flight 191 tumbled out of the sky at the northern edge of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, the tragedy’s enduring legacy is one of improved safety for airline passengers. The crash and its 137 deaths forged new technologies in aircraft and on the ground that have combined to prevent a similar accident of 191’s scale. “This was the watershed accident that helped really galvanize the aviation industry to get a broad range of improvements in weather prediction,” said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Lynn Lunsford, who covered the accident as a reporter.
“Delta 191’s aftermath changed how regulators approached weather threats, how pilots talked to each other in the cockpit and even how fire rescue crews at airports save lives at crashes….
“On the afternoon of Aug, 2, 1985, Delta 191 ran into a developing thunderstorm and wind shear conditions as it made its final approach to D/FW. The winds – a weather phenomenon known as a microburst – initially sped the plane up, then slowed it down dramatically and caused it to hit the ground before the runway.
“One of the plane’s wing engines struck a car on State Highway 114, killing its driver, and the plane bounced into a water tank and exploded. Of the 163 passengers and crew, all but 29 were killed; two more died later from injuries….” (Torbenson, Eric. “1985 Delta 191 disaster at D/FW Airport gave rise to broad safety overhaul.” Dallas Morning News, TX, Aug 2010.)
Sources
Associated Press. “Air Crashes In the U.S. Since 1979.” 7-20-1989. Accessed at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE5DD1E39F933A15754C0A96F948260&sec=&spon
Darby, Rick. “Cracking the Microburst Code – Meteorology Confronts a Mysterious Threat to Flight Safety.” AeroSafety World, March 2011, pp. 52-54.
History.com. This Day in History, Disaster, August 2, 1985. “Sudden Thunderstorm Causes Plane Crash.” Accessed 12-07-2008 at: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&displayDate=08/02&categoryId=disaster
Magnuson, Ed. “Like a Wall of Napalm. A Delta jet with 160 aboard crashes in a Texas thunderstorm.” Time, April 18, 2005. Accessed 1-26-2017 at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1050423-1,00.html
National Transportation Safety Board. Aircraft Accident Report. Delta Air Lines, Inc., Lockheed L-1011-385-1, N726DA, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Texas, August 2, 1985. (NTSB/AAR-86/05). Washington, DC: NTSB, August 15, 1986. Accessed 1-26-2017 at: http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/aircraft-accident-reports/AAR86-05.pdf
Sanders, D.E.A. (Chair), et al. The Management of Losses Arising from Extreme Events. GIRO, 2002, 261 pgs. At: http://www.actuaries.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/18729/Sanders.pdf
Smith, Mike. “Defeating the downburst: 20 years since last U.S. commercial jet accident from wind shear.” Washington Post, 7-2-2014. Accessed 1-26-2017 at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/07/02/defeating-the-downburst-20-years-since-last-u-s-commercial-jet-accident-from-wind-shear/?utm_term=.5c70c54ef03e
Torbenson, Eric. “1985 Delta 191 disaster at D/FW Airport gave rise to broad safety overhaul.” Dallas Morning News, TX, Aug 2010. Accessed 1-26-2017 at: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/transportation/2010/08/02/20100801-1985-Delta-191-disaster-at-D-7484
United Press International. “Delta Crash Toll Hits 137.” Sun-Sentinel, FL, 10-4-1985. Accessed 1-26-2017 at: http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1985-10-04/news/8502130006_1_parkland-memorial-hospital-crash-injuries
[1] Notes that “A passenger [Mark Vicich, 29, of Dallas]who suffered burns over 85 percent of his body and had both legs amputated because of injuries suffered in the Aug. 2 crash of Delta Flight 191 died Thursday, raising the death count to 137.”
[2] Two survivors later died of injuries. See Torbenson and UPI/Sun-Sentinel.
[3] Landing crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 66 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, NY, June 24, 1975, killing 113 passengers and crew.
[4] Mike Smith. Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather. Greenleaf, 2010.