Runway Disasters: Searing Reminders That Inaction Kills

David Richman had much to look forward to that Friday afternoon in February, 1991. He was 34. He and his wife had a 16-month-old daughter. They had another child on the way. And after graduating from Harvard University, he had recently landed a job as a math professor at the University of South Carolina, where he had distinguished himself as the “conscience” of the department.

But then USAir Flight 1493 slammed into a commuter plane as the jetliner attempted to land at Los Angeles International Airport.

In a horrifying blur of screeching metal and burning jet fuel, Richman and many of the other 33 passengers who would die that day were still alive when the jetliner crashed into a building before coming to rest on the tarmac.

The investigation later showed that many of the passengers had died from inhaling smoke while trying to escape.

Five years earlier, the National Transportation Safety Board had asked the Federal Aviation Administration to consider drafting regulations to improve access to aircraft emergency exits. The FAA issued the regulations--but two months after the Los Angeles accident.

Government documents also show that the FAA had been warned as far back as the early 1980s that the possibility of runway collisions was a growing hazard. The Los Angeles crash was the third such fatal accident in the United States in 13 months.

The day after the crash, Richman’s father, Alex, saw television clips of the crash coverage but didn’t know his son was on board. The family got the call that Sunday at 2 a.m.

“It was a terrible shock,” Alex Richman said.

David’s wife “was hoping that there was a mistake. She was holding out hope until the bodies were identified,” said David’s mother, Shifra Richman.

Added Alex Richman: “We knew in our heads that he was dead, but we were hoping in our hearts that like in television and the movies that he had just wandered away from the crash.”

“This is tombstone technology,” said Alex Richman, a college professor and psychiatrist in Nova Scotia. “It requires a tombstone for the required technology to be used. . . . The world airlines and the FAA are not using the technology we now have.”

*

The Eastern Airlines flight from New York to Atlanta was about to land Jan. 18, 1990, when Fred Land looked out the window to the darkened landing strip.

Suddenly, the plane made a sharp turn to the left, startling passengers. Then, Land felt a bump and watched as the right wing of the jet clipped a smaller plane on the runway.

The jet’s right wing sheared off the top of the small plane, killing the pilot and injuring a passenger. No one aboard Land’s flight was seriously injured.

Land’s business partner turned to him and said: “What do you think happened?”

“I said: ‘I think we ran over a plane,’ ” Land recalled.

He said he struggled with his emotions in the weeks following the crash. “This had a sobering impact on me. It was like cheating death. For some reason you are spared.”

Land said the fact that the collision could have occurred in the first place made him angry. “I find it remarkable that this could have happened. There are just way too many lives at stake.”

When he heard about the Los Angeles crash 13 months later, he remembered thinking: “It happened again. Why, Lord, didn’t someone fix the problem?”

*

It was foggy in Detroit on the afternoon of Dec. 3, 1990, when Milio Rinna climbed aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to Pittsburgh, Pa., where he was to attend a United Steelworkers union meeting.

The plane was half full, and Rinna’s seat was next to the noisy DC-9 engine. He considered moving to a better seat across the aisle but decided to stay put and read the afternoon newspaper.

Rinna said he was “surprised” when the plane started moving. “It was foggy out there, but I figured they knew what they were doing,” he said.

Moments later, a huge explosion rocked the other side of the aircraft.

“People were screaming and there was smoke and flames everywhere,” he said. “You are just shocked because you are just reading the newspaper and all of a sudden there is an explosion. Your heart starts pumping. You wonder what in the hell is happening.”

Just before escaping from the plane, Rinna noticed the lifeless bodies of two men slumped between their seats and the aisle. “There was nothing I could do for them,” he said.

“When you see someone die, it’s something you never forget,” he said.

Twelve people died in the runway collision--the second in a series of three such crashes in the United States.

“The more I heard” about the crash, he said, “the worse it got. How could we have had a collision?

“Where the heck were the safety coordinators and supervisors that are supposed to be looking out for this kind of thing?

“You have to develop safety programs before accidents occur.”