July 2nd will mark the 30th anniversary of an airplane crash that killed 37 people as it sought to land at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. The crash of US Air Flight 1016, which was due to wind shear, is remembered as the fourth in a series of five crashes over five years at USAir.
It is also remembered as the last wind shear crash in the United States.
Flying from Columbia, S.C. to Charlotte on Saturday evening, July 2, 1994, the flight encountered heavy thunderstorms and windshear while attempting to land. “Wind shear is a sudden change in wind velocity and or direction over a short distance,” according to the Airbus web site. “It is most dangerous at the lower levels, as a sudden loss of airspeed and altitude can occur.”
The McDonnell Douglas DC-9 was carrying 57 people. Thirty-seven passengers were killed, while 20 other passengers and crew were injured. A section of the airplane, which crashed into a house, came to rest on Wallace Neel Road.
US Air Flight 1016 has been newly remembered with a memorial at the new airport overlook that opened this month. In fact, July 2nd “was one of the deadlines” for the opening, said Stuart Hair, assistant airport director.
The overlook includes a granite headstone that previously stood at the nearby but inaccessible crash location. The plaque reads: “In Loving Memory Of All Those Who Died Or Were Injured And Those Who Helped In The Rescue And Restoration of US Air 1016 July 2, 1994.”
Speaking to reporters the day before the opening, Jack Christine, CLT chief infrastructure officer, said, “We’re not far from where 1016 crashed. We were very deliberate in trying to incorporate that. We tried to identify all the aspects of that incident and honor those folks that were part of it.”
Airline safety consultant John Cox was a USAir pilot and a member of the team that investigated the 1016 crash for the Air Line Pilots Association. Days after the crash, he interviewed the air traffic controllers and the pilots.
The airplane was within several hundred feet of the ground when the pilots confronted wind shear, he said. “They made a good decision to go around. What they didn’t know is that this storm would release massive amounts of cold air, which is heavier. The column of air was rushing down. It was a microburst. They tried to climb to exceed the downward flow.” But the engines could not take in enough air to climb.
“They sort of broke out of the rain and saw the trees,” Cox said. “They tried to clear the trees, but were not successful.” As part of the investigation, Cox surveyed the scene. “I saw that DC-9 scattered into that house,” he said. “It was an image that stays with you.”
“The captain particularly was emotional about it,” Cox recalled. “He felt he was responsible. We didn’t understand the magnitude of the wind shear for some time.”
Another memory, he said, is that the air traffic controller working the east side of the airport “was broadcasting more information to the airplanes” than the controller working on the west side, where the crash occurred. “I wondered if additional information would have gotten the go-around started earlier,” he said.
On the plus side, “It was the last wind shear accident in the United States,” Cox said. “Now, we’ve got predictive wind shear equipment in the airplanes; better equipment on the ground to locate and predict when wind shear will occur, and newer generation engines that do a better job than old airplanes, taking bigger bites of air.”
In December 1995, the Federal Aviation Administration installed Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TWDR) at Charlotte Douglas. “TDWR is a high quality, dedicated meteorological surveillance radar that detects wind shear conditions, thunderstorms, frontal passages, etc.,” an FAA spokeswoman said. “We installed the systems near the 45 largest airports in the U.S.”
Between 1989 and 1994, USAir, later US Airways and now part of American Airlines, experienced the worst five years in its history due to the unprecedented series of crashes. Among employees, “We all felt our future as an airline was bleak,” recalled David Castelveter, then Phoenix sales manager and part of USAir’s family support team following all five crashes.
A few hundred USAir employees were assigned to work with survivors’ families. “We were each assigned a family or families and told to provide any level of support they needed,” Castelveter said. “We ate with them and we often spent time at the hotel where they were staying. We were given credit cards to use at our discretion to provide as much relief as we could in a grieving situation. We were assigned all the way through to the services.”
Working the fourth crash was especially challenging, Castelveter said, because three crashes preceded it. At one point, a member of the family support team screamed and fell to the ground in the airport. “She couldn’t handle it any longer,” he said. “She had a breakdown. It put a toll on people, the tragic loss of life and wondering whether the airline would survive.”
John Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, discussed the cause of the Flight 1016 crash in an interview for my 2014 book, American Airlines, US Airways and the Creation of the World’s Largest Airline.
“The NTSB blamed the pilot, who may have been one degree below where he should have been, but it should not have been pilot error,” Goglia said. “At the time those pilots entered that wind shear, there was nothing they could do. They started landing in a clear sky but ran into wind shear, a violent downdraft, when they were only 200 feet above the ground, so there was no margin for error and no recovery possible.”
Besides Flight 1016, four USAir flights crashed between 1989 and 2014.
The first crash occurred in September 1989, when Flight 5050, a Boeing 737-400, departing from New York LaGuardia for Charlotte, attempted to take off in stormy, wet weather. It ended up submerged in the East River; the NTSB blamed pilot error.
In February 1991 Flight 1493 was landing at LAX when it collided with a SkyWest plane that was about to take off. The 34 fatalities included 22 people on the USAir flight: the NTSB primarily blamed air traffic controllers.
The third crash occurred at LGA in March 1992 when Flight 405 sought to take off for Cleveland but crashed into Flushing Bay just beyond the runway. Twenty-seven people were killed including the captain and a flight attendant. The NTSB blamed inadequate de-icing procedures.
The fifth crash came on September 8, 1994, just two months after the crash of Flight 1016. A total of 132 people were killed when Flight 427, a Boeing 737 flying from Chicago to Pittsburgh, crashed while attempting to land. The cause was rudder malfunction.
Before Stephen Wolf joined the carrier as CEO in 1995, he and longtime associate Larry Nagin reviewed the crashes to determine if somehow the carrier was fundamentally flawed. They found neither a common link nor corporate fault, Nagin later recalled.
