Frantic Bid to Abort Landing of Jetliner Told

The pilot of Delta Air Lines Flight 191 did not acknowledge a flight controller’s frantic order to abort his landing seconds before the jumbo jet crashed and burned, killing 133 persons, investigators said Sunday night.

When the controller saw the wide-bodied Lockheed L-1011 Tristar emerge from an intense thunderstorm at a low altitude, he radioed the urgent command, “Delta go around!” Patrick Bursley, a National Transportation Safety Board member, told a news conference.

Minutes before, the controller had ordered the jet to sharply reduce its speed to avoid overtaking a Lear Jet landing ahead of it, investigators said.

The pilot complied, cutting his airspeed by about 70 m.p.h. to a speed of 172 m.p.h. just as he headed into the violent rainstorm near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport on Friday, Bursley said.

Flying at Unsafe Altitude

The order to abort the landing, which was given because the L-1011 was flying at an unsafe altitude of 50 to 100 feet, may have come as the plane was bouncing from an initial impact, said Ira Furman, an NTSB spokesman.

“We don’t know if he already had made ground contact,” Furman said.

“We don’t know whether he initiated a go-around in response,” another NTSB investigator who refused to give his name said. “We know he didn’t acknowledge the order.”

Two to three seconds after the controller’s order went unacknowledged, the controller saw the plane’s left wing and nose tilt down, and saw fire on the left side as the plane touched the ground, Bursley said.

Delta spokesman Bill Jackson in Atlanta said the airline would have no immediate comment on the NTSB report. He said he did not know if two or three seconds was enough time for the aircraft to respond to the controls.

At the moment the plane crashed, the pilot, Capt. Edward M. Connors, had suddenly shoved his throttles to full speed, the investigators discovered Sunday after viewing data from the in-flight recorder, the engines and other wreckage. The captain was killed in the crash.

Earlier, Bursley said the two recorders, or “black boxes,” from the jet provided no indications of trouble in the minutes before the plane crashed Friday.

“There are no gross signs on the flight data recorder of any major problem,” Bursley said. He said investigators who listened to the voice recorder detected no alarm by the cockpit crew.

Controller Interviewed

Furman said he did not know whether the order to abort was picked up by the voice recorder, but said that had the crew been wearing earphones, the recorder would not have picked up the warning.

The account of the warning came from interviews with the controller and tapes of tower transmissions, he said.

Bursley said the airport’s alert system that warns of small, extremely violent weather systems, known as low-level wind shear, had not detected any such system before the crash.

But, he said, the alarm system went off about 14 minutes after Flight 191 crashed. Intense wind- shear gusts are considered among the most dangerous for an airplane to encounter during landing or takeoff, where there is little altitude to recover.

Often Causes a Stall

A wind shear fans out as it reaches the ground, forcing a plane downward and popping it with strong head winds followed immediately by strong tail winds and often causing it to stall if it is going too slowly.

Wind shear alert systems remain primitive and often do not detect all such localized violent downdrafts that normally occur during thunderstorms, safety officials said. More sophisticated systems are on the drawing board.

Another Delta spokesman, Matt Guilfoyle, earlier Sunday blamed the bad weather for the crash.

“It appears as if weather was the primary factor,” Guilfoyle said. “Hopefully, it will be viewed by the traveling public as what it was--an act of God.”

The aircraft bounced off a car on a nearby highway and killed a motorist, then skidded into some water tanks and burst into flames. Officials Sunday raised the death toll among those on board the plane to 132 with the discovery of the body of a 2-year-old girl.

Family Members Killed

The child, Laurin Mahserejian, apparently had been an unticketed passenger. She was traveling with her mother, brother and two grandparents, all of whom were killed.

In a correction Sunday, officials said that one of the victims of the crash, Deborah Wight of Sherman Oaks, was incorrectly identified as Deborah Wright.

Thirty-one in the smoking section to the rear of the plane survived when the tail section broke off. Sixteen of the 31 persons injured in the crash remained hospitalized Sunday, 10 in critical condition.

The flight had originated in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and was bound for Los Angeles.