Midair collision sent PSA Flight 182 hurtling into suburban San Diego street
IT was a bright, hot, clear day over San Diego and there was no reason a Boeing 727 shouldn’t have seen a Cessna flying nearby. But a series of errors brought the two aircraft tragically into a collision.
Today in History
Don't miss out on the headlines from Today in History. Followed categories will be added to My News.
IT was a clear, hot day in San Diego. And with 16km visibility, they were not the conditions anyone would have imagined an aviation hazard. But sometimes things can go wrong even under the best conditions.
In this case a Boeing 727-214 operated by Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) was preparing to land at Lindbergh Field in San Diego about 9am on September 25, 1978.
The pilots had been told to “see and avoid” a small Cessna flying in the area. They took a visual sighting on a Cessna but lost sight of it at a crucial moment. At 9.01 Captain James McFeron asked for clearance to land and Lindbergh Tower gave it. But as they started their descent First Officer Robert Fox asked “Are we clear of that Cessna?”
Flight engineer Martin Wahne opined “supposed to be”. The problem was nobody seemed sure. Captain McFeron then said: “Oh yeah, before we turned downwind, I saw him at about one o’clock, probably behind us now.” Whatever the captain had seen, it wasn’t what they had been warned about.
The Cessna they were meant to avoid was in a blind spot in front of and below the 727. As the large passenger jet began to rapidly descend, the right wing hit the top of the Cessna, knocking it out of the sky and killing its occupants — student pilot David Boswell and his instructor Martin Kazy — as the wreckage of their aircraft plummeted to the ground.
The impact also ruptured the fuel tanks on the right wing of the PSA plane. It burst into flames as the captain struggled to control the stricken aircraft. On the cockpit recording, Fox can be heard saying: “We’re hit, man, we are hit.” The final words on the recording are one of the flight crew saying: “Ma, I love ya.”
On the ground, a photographer with the San Diego County Public Relations Office captured the last moments of the aircraft, wing aflame (inset), as it crashed into a suburban street in San Diego.
Aboard the PSA plane, 135 passengers and crew perished, along with the two men in the Cessna. But there were also seven people killed as the 727 struck houses on the ground.
At the time it was the worst air crash in US aviation history.
The day began normally. PSA Flight 182 had started in Sacramento, flying on to Los Angeles before departing at 8.30am for San Diego, with 128 passengers and seven crew members. Among the passengers were 30 PSA employees who often used these short domestic flights to get around.
As Flight 182 headed to San Diego, Kazy and Boswell took off from Montgomery Field about 16km northeast of San Diego airport. Boswell, a US Marine Corps sergeant, was practising landing using instruments and was wearing a special hood to limit peripheral vision to simulate the sort of conditions that necessitate such a landing. This was standard practice and in no way contributed to the disaster.
There were many factors that put the two aircraft on a fatal collision course. One, the crew of Flight 182 failed to properly keep track of the Cessna. Two, the Cessna had altered its course, and three, the tower gave clearance to land not knowing that the two planes were not in visual contact with each other. No party was completely to blame.
The collision, 40 years ago today, sent both aircraft plunging helplessly toward the ground. The smaller plane was all but destroyed on impact and the larger was sent into a lethal dive beyond any pilot’s control. The Cessna’s wreckage landed at an intersection near a highway, fortunately not harming anybody on the ground. But the 727 struck houses in the San Diego suburb of North Park.
A couple in a car driving down the street were killed as it was hit by the plunging jet. Four people were killed in a daycare centre as it was ripped apart by shrapnel from the disintegrating plane. A woman and her child were sprayed with blood and glass as a body struck the window of her car.
Emergency teams quickly descended on the scene but there was nothing they could do. A nearby school gym was used as a temporary morgue, but only four intact bodies were found.
In the wake of the disaster, victims’ families launched lawsuits against the airline, the airport and the flying school. A Federal Aviation Authority report laid much of the blame at the feet of the PSA crew, but noted a number of contributing factors.
It would lead to closer monitoring of aircraft around airports to keep aircraft separate and the introduction of a Traffic Collision Alert and Avoidance System, which gives pilots more warnings, visual and audio, about
other aircraft in the vicinity.