Boeing Can’t Explain How Delta Pilot Made Error
A Boeing Co. official said Thursday that there is no ready explanation of how a veteran airline captain activated the wrong controls--pulling two round fuel cutoff knobs instead of pushing a square button two inches away--and caused a Delta Boeing 767 to plunge within 600 feet of the Pacific after taking off from Los Angeles International Airport.
The pilot, according to federal investigators, reacted to an amber warning light telling him there was a problem with the engines’ fuel flow. The Boeing official said the original fuel problem was not critical and could have easily been corrected by pulling back the throttle and pushing the square button.
“One’s a square button and the others are round knobs,” said Elizabeth Reese, the spokeswoman for Seattle-based Boeing. “How could he make such a mistake? That’s a good question.”
No Serious Injury
The aircraft, Delta Flight 810 bound for Cincinnati and carrying 194 passengers and a crew of eight, fell from an altitude of 1,600 feet to about 600 feet shortly after leaving LAX early Tuesday afternoon. No one was seriously hurt and the flight continued on to Cincinnati.
The Delta captain has told federal investigators that he inadvertently pulled the two knobs on the jet’s console, cutting off fuel to both engines and immediately shutting them down, sending the aircraft and its terrified passengers into a silent descent.
Neither federal investigators nor Delta has any idea how the pilot could have activated the wrong controls.
The New York Times reported in its Friday editions that the Federal Aviation Administration has issued an emergency order requiring a safety guard between the switches to prevent a recurrence. The order imposed a 10-day deadline for the guard on all 77 of the Boeing 767s in use in the United States, as well as on 30 domestic Boeing 757s.
According to interviews conducted on Wednesday at Delta’s Atlanta headquarters by National Transportation Safety Board investigators, the captain and his first officer said that power was not restored “for about a minute,” according to a safety board spokesman in Washington.
In that time, said the spokesman, Ted Lopatkiewicz, the jet descended to about 600 feet.
A Delta spokesman in Atlanta, Dick Jones, said the two men in the cockpit have a combined 43 years of commercial flight experience. Both crew members, whose identities are being kept confidential by Delta, have been temporarily grounded pending completion of an investigation by the safety board, the Federal Aviation Administration and Delta.
On Thursday, some passengers were still angry over Delta’s decision to allow the plane to continue to its destination.
“It makes me madder, madder and madder” that the jet’s captain did not return to LAX, said Tom Fitzsimons, 31, of Huntington Beach, whose wife, Kim, 30, and 2-year-old daughter, Alice, were aboard the plane. “He should have been on that phone saying, ‘Let me land,’ ” Fitzsimons said Thursday.
Delta’s Jones called such remarks “Monday morning quarterbacking.”
‘No Basic Problem’
The pilot, Jones said, told both the FAA and Delta that the amber light had flickered on, indicating that an engine was not burning fuel efficiently. He was then told to correct the problem manually and continue to Cincinnati, Jones said, adding: “There was no basic problem with that airplane.”
The pilot and co-pilot, in their interviews with the safety board, and two passengers interviewed by The Times disputed reports that the captain warned passengers “to get ready to crash.”
Kim Fitzsimons said in a telephone interview from Hartford, Conn., that the pilot remained silent until after the engines were restarted. Then, she said, the pilot “told us it was human error and we were going to continue on to Cincinnati.”
This story was corroborated by her sister, Megan O’Neill, 24, of Canton, Conn., who said flight attendants told passengers to don life jackets. “But there weren’t enough life jackets for the children on board. Someone threw us a life jacket,” she said, for her sister’s child.
“I was petrified,” O’Neill said in a telephone interview from her Connecticut home. “All of a sudden it got very silent” when the engines stopped, “and the lights in the cabin went off. But the passengers held their composure pretty well.”
According to Lopatkiewicz, the problem that triggered the warning light involved the jet’s electronic engine control system, which governs how the engines use fuel, converting it into thrust power.
‘It’s Not Critical’
“It’s a cautionary message,” Reese said of the warning light. “It’s not critical.” When the warning light flashes, she said, the pilot should manually disconnect the electronic control system by pushing a square button on a console. Then, she said, the pilot can manually operate the fuel flow.
The button is two inches below the two knobs, she said, one for each of the jet’s two engines, which, when pulled, shut off fuel to the engines. To restart the engines, she said, an emergency auxiliary system was deployed.
