In Heavy Snowstorm, Jet Skids Off Chicago Runway Into Street

Trying to land in a heavy snowstorm at Midway International Airport, a Southwest Airlines jet slid off the end of a runway Thursday evening, slammed through a fence and barrier, and finally crashed into two cars on a traffic-filled street.

A 6-year-old boy in one of the vehicles was killed and at least eight people on the ground -- including two other children -- were seriously injured, said local medical and fire department officials. Aviation Department spokeswoman Wendy Abrams said that two passengers on the plane had minor injuries.

The accident happened as a snowstorm swept through the Midwest, leaving motorists stranded and airports bogged down. Midway was shut down after the accident, with no estimate on when it would reopen.

Southwest Flight 1248 en route from Baltimore-Washington International Airport was landing around 7:15 p.m. at Midway, about eight miles southwest of downtown Chicago. The Boeing 737 jet was carrying 90 passengers and a crew of five, said a spokesman from the Federal Aviation Administration.

At the time, there was about seven inches of snow on the ground, law enforcement officials said.

The air was so thick with swirling snow that motorists could barely make out the streetlights. By 10 p.m., there was more than nine inches of snow on the ground at Midway.

Fernando Ruiz, who lives less than half a block away from where the collision occurred, told reporters he was in front of his house shoveling snow with his wife when the plane pushed through the sheet-metal fence separating the airport from the street.

The aircraft then careened into traffic near the corner of 55th Street and Central Avenue, at the northwest corner of the airport.

“It got really bumpy, and then a big crashing sound,” passenger Katie Duda told WMAQ-TV. The next thing she knew, the airplane had skidded past the airport and into the street.

The noise was so loud, “I thought it was a semi that had crashed,” Marie Velasquez, who lives near the airport, told local TV reporters. “There was a car wedged underneath the plane. You could see the people inside the plane, looking out the windows.”

When the Chicago Fire Department arrived on the scene, they found one car crushed under the side of the plane and another under a wing, said Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter.

The airline passengers used inflatable slides to get out of the plane in the blowing snow.

“People were shook up, as you can imagine,” Trotter said.

Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA were on their way from Washington to investigate the incident.

Southwest Chief Executive Gary C. Kelly told Associated Press that the plane had circled Midway for 30 to 35 minutes because of the weather and the flight traffic before it was cleared for landing on the airport’s 6,500-foot runway.

Kelly would not speculate on what could have caused the accident, but said the plane’s captain had been flying for about 10 years.

Midway is Chicago’s second-largest airport, with annual passenger traffic of about 17 million. It is in the center of a residential neighborhood, and homes flank its one-square-mile perimeter. Southwest is a primary carrier at Midway.

Aviation experts say the airport is known for having shorter-than-average runways, in part because Midway is land-locked and has limited options for expansion.

“Midway is on the shorter end of runways, which is why they don’t have really large and heavy planes land there,” said Barry Schiff, a retired TWA pilot and air crash safety consultant based in Los Angeles.

The largest planes to land at Midway are Boeing 757s, said FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro. Larger jets, such as Boeing 777s, are routed across town to O’Hare International Airport.

Schiff said that any number of problems could be blamed for the collision, including the snow hiding a layer of ice on the runway or the plane landing too quickly.

“No one’s going to know right now. There’s just too many what-ifs to know for sure. But the weather could easily have been a factor,” Schiff said.

Weather also caused havoc elsewhere in the Midwest. In Indiana, dozens of schools dismissed students early, and community groups and churches canceled events, as many cities reported four to six inches of snow by evening.

In Missouri, all three passengers in a sport utility vehicle were killed Thursday when it crossed a median on a snow-covered interstate near Charleston and struck a tractor-trailer head-on, said State Highway Patrol Sgt. Larry Plunkett.

Traffic crawled across the main roads in Chicago, where snowplows rushed to stay ahead of the snowfall. Pedestrians struggled to wade through unshoveled sidewalks, where drifts were up to 15 inches high.