Doomed Plane De-Iced With Credit Cards

Crew members of a commuter plane that crashed last year, killing six people, used credit cards to scrape ice from the wings and propellers and declined de-icing equipment at least twice, investigators said today.

The report by the National Transportation Safety Board contained no conclusions about the cause of the Dec. 26 crash, said author Eric Sager of the NTSB in Washington.

“It’s one small part of the investigation,” Sager said in a telephone interview. “That information may or may not end up in the report.”

A final report will be issued in several weeks.

The United Express plane, en route from Seattle by way of Yakima, crashed about 400 feet short of the runway at Pasco, about 80 miles south of Yakima. Everyone aboard was killed.

Ice can slow an airplane or force it down by increasing weight and drag.

Sager said he did not believe that it was unusual that the co-pilot and another United Express employee would be using credit cards to remove ice from the 19-passenger British Aerospace Jetstream 31 turboprop during the stop in Yakima.

“Ice is very frequent,” Sager said. “They were attending to it.”

The employees were looking at the wings and presumably believed that the buildup was not enough to warrant the use of de-icing equipment, Sager said.

However, a United Express ramp agent in Yakima told investigators that she was surprised the captain had chosen not to de-ice. She said most other planes were undergoing the five-minute procedure that night because it was misting and cold.

“She noticed that chips of ice were blown back toward her in the propeller wash” as the plane departed, the report said.