Jet Skids Off Runway Onto Burbank Street

A Southwest Airlines jet carrying 137 passengers and five crew members careened off a Burbank Airport runway Sunday night, skidding to a stop on an adjacent street where it hit a car. Six people were slightly injured.

The jet, a Boeing 737 arriving from Las Vegas, was landing at 6:11 p.m. when it slid off the wet pavement, broke through a barrier at the end of the runway and came to a stop on Hollywood Way a few yards from a gas station.

Witnesses described the sound of the crash as unforgettable and the scene as surreal.

“What do you say when you see a plane come out of the sky and land in the middle of the street 100 feet away from you?” one asked.

The pilot suffered cuts to his scalp and was taken to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills. Another crew member and four passengers also were taken to the medical center. They complained of back, neck and stomach pains. All were listed in fair condition.

As the plane skidded across Hollywood Way, it struck a Ford Taurus, carrying a woman and her 4-year-old daughter. They saw the plane careening toward them, authorities said, and jumped out of the car before the collision. Neither was injured.

Federal Aviation Administration officials said it was too soon to determine the cause of the accident, but a spokesman said it appeared that the pilot overshot part of the runway.

“It’s too early to tell [the cause] except perhaps that he landed too long,” said FAA spokesman Louis Diaz.

Victor Gill, director of public and community affairs for the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport, said the airport did not shut down after the accident.

Gill said the National Transportation Safety Board has requested that the plane remain on Hollywood Way until the investigation is completed.

“We don’t know whether it will be a quick removal or not,” he said. “Monday is out as far as reopening that section of Hollywood Way. “

Gill said there have been no recent fatalities involving commercial jets at the airport. There were two fatal incidents in the 1990s involving private aircraft departing from the airport.

Several passengers and witnesses said the plane appeared to approach the runway too steeply and too fast.

“We were screaming down the tarmac,” said passenger Kevin McCoy, a La Canada Flintridge business executive who was returning from a weekend vacation in Las Vegas with his wife.

“When we hit the barriers, it was explosive.”

McCoy said he thought about his 4-year-old daughter as he watched the landing from his window seat.

“We just bore down into the barrier and into Hollywood Way and here comes that Chevron station,” he said. “It made me very nervous.”

Although the landing was frightening, passengers said no one on board panicked as the plane came to a stop and the crew began evacuation. The inflatable chute on the front exit apparently malfunctioned, forcing the passengers to exit from the back chute.

Once all 137 passengers were on the ground, they began to weep and hug each other.

‘Luckiest Person in the World’

“I doubt there’s a single person on this plane that doesn’t feel like the luckiest person in the world,” said McCoy.

Lorena Monroy, a mail clerk from Los Angeles, was dropping off her boyfriend at the airport when she saw the plane pass her gate.

“The plane just screamed by,” she said. “You could tell it should have landed way before it did.”

The plane came to a rest only a few yards from the gas station, with twisted lengths of the runway’s barrier sticking out of the plane’s engines.

The crash sounded like “two trains slamming together,” said eyewitness Donalda Hill, 37, of Albany, Ore.

“It was coming down straight from the sky right toward us,” said Hill, who was in town for her daughter’s gymnastic competition. “We started to run when we saw the nose smash through a fence and into a car.”

The plane screeched to a halt right before it hit the gas station, she said.

Burbank Fire Marshal Darryl Ford said the plane spilled about 10 gallons of fuel on the roadway. Firefighters immediately dumped foam fire retardant on the road and closed the gas station, he said.

The plane’s remaining fuel will be drained into tanker trucks, then the craft will be hoisted back onto airport property as soon as possible, Ford said. Two cranes were en route late Sunday night.

Officials from Southwest Airlines said the seventh largest airline had not suffered a fatality in its 30-year history. Its safety record leads the industry.

Rash of Jet Accidents

The incident is the latest in a rash of airline accidents in the past few months.

Among them: Two private planes collided in midair over Sylmar last month, killing all four aboard.

In January, 88 people died when an Alaska Airlines jet plummeted into the waters off Anacapa Island. Both accidents are still under investigation.

The Southwest jet was landing on the airport’s east-west runway, which is over 6,000 feet long and 150 feet wide.

A Southwest spokeswoman said that the plane ran off the runway, but gave no reason why.

“It’s not certain why the aircraft wasn’t able to stop at the runway,” said Kristin Nelson.

Burbank Airport, which handles 4.7 million passengers every year, has been the focus of a two-decade-long dispute over the relocation of its passenger terminal.

The existing terminal, situated just 250 feet from the airport’s east-west runway, dates from 1930.

Burbank officials say the length of Runway 8 has not been an issue in the current debate over the terminal building.

Rather, most of the controversy has centered on the size and scope of the terminal.

Negotiations Over Expansion

After a fierce legal and political battle, negotiators for the city of Burbank and the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority signed a framework agreement in August to replace the old terminal with a new 14-gate, 330,000-square-foot facility.

The agreement has not been finalized, and key provisions have been attacked by the airlines, political leaders, residents and the FAA.

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Times staff writers Hector Becerra, Andrew Blankstein, David Colker and Jeffrey Gettleman contributed to this story.

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Jet Skids Off Runway

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 careened off the runway at Burbank Airport, crashing through a fence and coming to a halt on Hollywood Way, just short of a gas station.

Jet Skids Off Runway, ROGER KUO / Los Angeles Times

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This story has been edited to reflect a correction to the original published text. The east-west runway in Burbank, at 6,032 feet, is shorter than the north-south runway, which is 6,886 feet long.

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