Federal investigators were dispatched to the Twin Cities on Wednesday to probe the collision of two Northwest Airlines jets. The planes' "black boxes" were shipped to Washington, D.C., with the hope that they'll reveal how the accident happened Tuesday night at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Six Northwest employees and two passengers were injured when an inbound Northwest DC-9 taxiing to a gate went out of control and crashed into a bigger Northwest Airbus A319 jetliner.
A Northwest pilot remained hospitalized in satisfactory condition Wednesday. The five other airline workers and two passengers were treated and released Tuesday night. Northwest declined to identify the employees.
The DC-9, with 94 passengers and five crew members aboard, clipped the Airbus, which had pulled away from a gate on the Lindbergh Terminal's G concourse. The DC-9 then slid under the tail section of the Airbus, and a wing of the Airbus sliced into the DC-9's cockpit. The airbus was carrying 38 passengers and a crew of five.
Other than to say it is cooperating with federal agencies in the investigation, Eagan-based Northwest had no comment.
The investigation will likely take months to complete, said National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Paul Schlamm. "This is so early in the process," he said.
The NTSB assigned an investigator from its Chicago office to the case. It's also sending two specialists from its Washington, D.C., office. Others may follow in coming days.
Before landing, the DC-9 radioed air traffic controllers to report hydraulic problems, said airport spokesman Patrick Hogan.
As the plane landed, airport firetrucks were lined up along the runway as a precaution. The plane landed without incident but "appeared to lose steering control" as it approached a gate on the G concourse, Hogan said.
Northwest would not identify the DC-9 involved. But the NTSB said it is plane N763NC, manufactured in 1976. Federal Aviation Administration records show that 22 service difficulty reports have been filed about the plane since 1995.
The problems were repaired and did not appear to involve systems or issues that would explain the aircraft's loss of control on the ground. The most recent service report concerned the November 2002 repair of a crack.
Northwest and its mechanics have long been at odds about job cuts and the outsourcing of aircraft maintenance to vendors in the U.S. and overseas. But there was no finger pointing by the union Wednesday.
"We will work with NWA to come to a conclusion about what went wrong,'' mechanics' union President Ted Ludwig said.
The type of accident that occurred Tuesday night is rare, said Bob Vandel, executive vice president of the nonprofit Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., an international organization focusing on safety in the aviation industry.
In the United States, accidents involving large airplanes occur once every 4 million flights, Vandel said. Accidents involving an airliner taxiing into another are less likely, he estimated.
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has had some three dozen on-ground collisions involving planes since 1982, according to FAA and NTSB records.
During that time, however, there have been about 9.9 million takeoffs and landings at the airport.
Only six of the accidents involved "substantial damage,'' the records indicate. Seventeen of the planes involved in on-ground collisions had passengers on board.
One accident that caused substantial damage occurred Sept. 8, 1997, when a Northwest Airlines DC-9 struck a parked plane while workers were trying to maneuver it around the stationary aircraft. There were no injuries.
In Tuesday night's accident, the captain and first officer of the DC-9 were injured, along with two other crew members. Two ground employees also were slightly hurt. No crew members on the Airbus were injured.
Northwest said injuries to one passenger were slight, while the other complained of shortness of breath.
A Northwest mechanic who was trying to extract the DC-9's pilots from the plane's cockpit was among the injured. He was splashed with jet fuel that leaked from the Airbus wing that cut into the DC-9, Ludwig said.
"We are really thankful that no one was more severely injured,'' he said. "This could have been a catastrophe, with all the fuel."
