Canadian Data Joins Issues in N.Y. Jet Crash

A Federal Aviation Administration official said the agency never saw a report on a 1989 fatal accident that contained data a Canadian judge said might have averted a USAir crash this week at La Guardia Airport.

“We didn’t even know it existed,” FAA spokesman Fred Farrar said. “We quite often don’t get reports issued by other governments.”

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz also said his agency never saw the report.

But Gordon A. Haugh, a spokesman for the Canadian inquiry panel headed by Justice Virgil Moshansky, said the interim report on the March, 1989, Air Ontario crash was sent to the FAA and all major U.S. airlines.

The issue of who saw the report is significant because the crashes were strikingly similar and because recommendations in it could have prevented Sunday’s crash, Moshansky said Thursday. Both crashes involved Dutch-made Fokker F-28s.

“If in fact a cause of the USAir crash is determined to be wing contamination, it is safe to say that the necessary information to have avoided that catastrophic event is contained in the evidentiary record and within the pages of the second interim report,” Moshansky said.

The November, 1990, report called for reforms in de-icing procedures, which were partially to blame in the Dryden, Ontario, crash that killed 24 people. De-icing remains a prime focus in the USAir crash that killed 27 people.

The USAir plane crashed and skidded into frigid Flushing Bay while taking off in a snowstorm at La Guardia Airport. Twenty-four people survived.

Moshansky said that when he heard about the crash, “My first reaction, in fact, was, ‘My God, it’s Dryden all over again.’ ”

Among the recommendations that might have helped prevent the La Guardia crash was the call for greater use of Type II de-icing fluid, which lasts longer than the more widely used Type I.