We're Going Down, Larry

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Cockpit tapes show that the doomed jetliner was icing up

As the snow swirled down on Washington that Wednesday afternoon, the drivers creeping past National Airport could barely see their way. Some even parked on the road and stepped out into the blizzard to clean their windshields of the sticky snow before driving farther. On the runways at National, the snow and ice were just as bad. Several of the idling jetliners returned to their bays more than once to be cleared of snow and ice and swabbed with glycol antifreeze.

The crew in the cockpit of Air Florida's Flight 90 were not oblivious to the freezing conditions; their plane had been de-iced twice. Yet the pilots' attitude about the buildup of ice on their Boeing 737 was at times casual, perhaps imprudently so, judging from their tape-recorded conversations released last week by the National Transportation Safety Board. Just after the joking stopped, the jet lumbered into the air, slammed against a bridge and plunged into the Potomac River, killing the pilots, 72 others aboard and four passing motorists.

The NTSB has not finished its investigation of the crash, but the pilots' conversation supports the leading line of speculation about the causes: the snowy, 24° weather. First Officer Roger Alan Pettit, 31, the copilot, initially expressed concern about the icy conditions, as he would again and again. Twenty minutes after the 737's last glycol wash, Pettit joked: "Maybe we can taxi upside a some [727] sittin' there runnin' [and] blow off whatever [ice and snow have built up on the wings]." Several minutes later Pettit remarked, "It's been a while since we've been de-iced." He remained astonished by the weather. "See all those icicles on the back there and everything?" Minutes later Pettit said, "Boy, this is a losing battle trying to de-ice those things. It [gives] you a false sense of security, that's all it does." Replied the pilot, Captain Larry Wheaton, 34: "That, ah, satisfies the feds."

Unlike the pilots of several nearby planes, Wheaton and Pettit, neither of whom had had extensive experience flying in such weather, never mentioned to the control tower their concern about the ice each saw building up on the wings. Pettit said only to his pilot: "This one's got about a quarter to half an inch [of ice] on it." Despite the unequivocal federal regulation against flying with snow, frost or ice on the wings or engines, they taxied out to take off. Pettit was at the controls. "Slushy runway. Do you want me to do anything special for it or just go for it?" he asked. Wheaton: "Unless you got anything special you'd like to do." Pettit then described his planned ascent maneuvers, with the final, jesting caveat, "depending on how scared we are."

Reading the transcripts last week, one 737 pilot was surprised by the looseness of cockpit procedure. Said he: "I can't imagine getting ready to roll and asking 'Should I just go for it?' " Remarked another top airline pilot: "My God. Either those guys were scared to death, or they hadn't the foggiest idea of what they were getting into."