Huck
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From St. Petersburg Times:
Plane crash inquiry focuses on red lights
A colorblind co-pilot's ability to see runway warnings is at issue in a July 2002 crash landing of a FedEx plane in Tallahassee.
By BILL ADAIR, Times Staff Writer
Published December 26, 2003
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating whether the crash of a FedEx plane in Tallahassee last year was caused by a colorblind co-pilot who may have had difficulty seeing red warning lights.
Investigators are exploring the possibility that co-pilot William Frye failed to see red lights beside the runway that indicated the Boeing 727 was dangerously low, according to NTSB documents.
The cargo plane crashed one-half mile short of the runway and exploded in a fireball. Frye and two other pilots were injured; all three remain on administrative leave, pending the outcome of the inquiry.
The crash wreaked havoc with state politics, delaying qualifying paperwork for at least eight legislative elections.
Investigators of the July 26, 2002, crash are trying to determine the cause. The pilots say the lights never gave a red warning. But other evidence indicates the lights were working.
Frye's colorblindness has added a wrinkle.
Federal rules require that pilots see colors well enough to distinguish between red and green, which are used in instrument panels and warning lights. Frye passed vision tests as a Navy pilot from 1981 through the mid 1990s, but failed a color test when he got his airline license in 1995 because of "a mild red-green defect." The Federal Aviation Administration gave him a waiver because of his "demonstrated ability" as a pilot.
After the Tallahassee crash, the NTSB had Frye's vision tested at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. Doctors found he had a "severe" problem that could make it difficult to interpret red and white warning lights like the ones at the Tallahassee airport.
But William Walsh, captain of the FedEx flight, told the St. Petersburg Times this week the lights indicated they were making a safe descent. "Everything visual that we saw told us we were on glide path," he said.
Don Maciejewski, a Jacksonville aviation attorney representing the pilots, said Frye's vision problems do not affect his ability to see red and the crash was probably caused by malfunctioning warning lights.
The plane was "well below the glide path and they are not getting an indication," Maciejewski said. "That tells me something is wrong with the system."
"A black hole approach"
When Frye heard he was scheduled for the Tallahassee trip, he asked a supervisor if he was required to fly it.
He had just arrived at the cargo airline's Memphis hub and wondered if he could be assigned to a flight a few hours later. A FedEx duty officer told him that was permitted because he had chosen to fly under reserve status, which allowed the company to change his schedule at the last minute.
A FedEx spokesman declined to comment for this story because the crash is under investigation.
The plane departed Memphis at 4:24 a.m. on July 26 and climbed to 29,000 feet. Frye flew the plane while Walsh handled radio duties. Sitting directly behind them was flight engineer David Mendez, who kept track of the fuel and electrical and hydraulic systems.
As they approached the Tallahassee airport in the darkness at about 5:30 a.m., the pilots chose not to land on Runway 27 because of slight winds at the airport. That runway has an Instrument Landing System that would have guided them to the runway with a moving target on the cockpit instrument panel. By keeping the target lined up properly, Frye could have maintained the proper descent directly to the runway.
Instead, they decided to land from the opposite direction on Runway 9.
It has a more basic way of guiding pilots to make a safe descent, a system called a Precision Approach Path Indicator or PAPI. It has bright red and white lights angled to show pilots when they are too high or too low.
If all four PAPI lights are red, the plane is too low. If they are all white, the plane is too high. Pilots are supposed to adjust their descent so they see two red and two white, which indicates the proper angle.
The FedEx pilots faced an additional challenge: the early-morning darkness. As they arrived over the sparsely populated Florida Panhandle, there was not much light from the ground. Pilots call it a "black hole approach."
Al Dickinson, the head of the University of Southern California Aviation Safety Program, says black hole approaches can be challenging.
"There's no horizon, nothing to orient you."
"The airplane is on fire!'
"FedEx 1478, turning final, Runway 9," Walsh said on the radio to alert other pilots who might have been in the area.
About 4 miles from the airport, the plane descended too low, according to NTSB calculations. The pilots should have seen four red lights at that point.
At first, it appeared Frye saw the warning. He added a little power to the engines and told the other pilots, "I'm gonna have to stay just a little bit higher or I'm gonna lose the end of the runway."
But he did not pull up, according to the plane's data recorder. The plane kept descending.
The pilots should have seen four red lights practically shouting at them for nearly 40 seconds, according to the NTSB calculations. But they say they never saw those lights.
Walsh said all three pilots followed standard procedure and were looking out the window as the plane approached the Tallahassee airport. They each saw the PAPI, but never saw it all red.
"Believe me, I have flown a lot of PAPIs," Walsh said. "If I saw a white light and the next one was even pink to red, I would make a correction. We never saw that. We never saw any indication we were below glide path."
The cockpit tape indicates that when the plane was about 2 miles away, Walsh said, "I think it's starting to disappear in there a little bit, isn't it?" He was referring to a slight mist that was obscuring the runway and the lights. But four seconds later on the tape, he seemed satisfied they could see the runway.
"I think we'll be all right," he said.
Eight seconds later, the plane hit some trees and exploded into flames.
Walsh remembers the thumps and the cockpit lights going out.
"It was pitch black," he said.
He climbed out a window and called back to the other pilots.
"Get out! Get out! The airplane is on fire!"
Frye and Mendez did not respond, so he helped them escape.
Testing the pilot's eyes
Shortly after the crash, the NTSB explored the possibility the PAPI lights had malfunctioned. But tests indicated they had been working.
Maciejewski, the attorney for the pilots, said the NTSB tests were inadequate because they did not replicate the nighttime conditions of the flight. He says the PAPI lights might have malfunctioned because of "contamination" on the lenses or because they had been banged by an airport lawn mower.
It will be a month or two before the NTSB determines the probable cause of the crash, but the documents released provide considerable evidence that Frye's colorblindness was a factor.
Colorblindness affects about 8 percent of men but less than 1 percent of women. It is a condition in which the eye has difficulty distinguishing colors.
NTSB officials said they could not recall other airline crashes caused by colorblindness, but they pointed to a 1996 train collision in New Jersey that was blamed on the engineer's inability to see a red stop signal. That accident killed three people and injured 158.
Several tests indicated Frye had a "severe" color problem, the Air Force vision experts said in a letter to the NTSB. They said he had "red-green defect" that could make it difficult to distinguish PAPI warning lights.
They said the severity of his problem had been undetected for much of his Navy career because Frye had passed a color test called the Farnsworth Lantern that doctors now believe is flawed.
It appears the Federal Aviation Administration granted him a waiver because a doctor concluded from Frye's Navy experience that he had sufficient color vision.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said FAA doctors did their best with the information they had.
"The system is designed to prevent pilots who are medically unfit from flying planes," Brown said. "But there is also a responsibility with the pilot to understand what his own deficiencies are."
But Maciejewski, the attorney, says Frye has "has a blue-green color problem" that would not affect his ability to see red.
"Sometimes pilots do mess up," he said. "This ain't one of them."
Plane crash inquiry focuses on red lights
A colorblind co-pilot's ability to see runway warnings is at issue in a July 2002 crash landing of a FedEx plane in Tallahassee.
By BILL ADAIR, Times Staff Writer
Published December 26, 2003
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating whether the crash of a FedEx plane in Tallahassee last year was caused by a colorblind co-pilot who may have had difficulty seeing red warning lights.
Investigators are exploring the possibility that co-pilot William Frye failed to see red lights beside the runway that indicated the Boeing 727 was dangerously low, according to NTSB documents.
The cargo plane crashed one-half mile short of the runway and exploded in a fireball. Frye and two other pilots were injured; all three remain on administrative leave, pending the outcome of the inquiry.
The crash wreaked havoc with state politics, delaying qualifying paperwork for at least eight legislative elections.
Investigators of the July 26, 2002, crash are trying to determine the cause. The pilots say the lights never gave a red warning. But other evidence indicates the lights were working.
Frye's colorblindness has added a wrinkle.
Federal rules require that pilots see colors well enough to distinguish between red and green, which are used in instrument panels and warning lights. Frye passed vision tests as a Navy pilot from 1981 through the mid 1990s, but failed a color test when he got his airline license in 1995 because of "a mild red-green defect." The Federal Aviation Administration gave him a waiver because of his "demonstrated ability" as a pilot.
After the Tallahassee crash, the NTSB had Frye's vision tested at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. Doctors found he had a "severe" problem that could make it difficult to interpret red and white warning lights like the ones at the Tallahassee airport.
But William Walsh, captain of the FedEx flight, told the St. Petersburg Times this week the lights indicated they were making a safe descent. "Everything visual that we saw told us we were on glide path," he said.
Don Maciejewski, a Jacksonville aviation attorney representing the pilots, said Frye's vision problems do not affect his ability to see red and the crash was probably caused by malfunctioning warning lights.
The plane was "well below the glide path and they are not getting an indication," Maciejewski said. "That tells me something is wrong with the system."
"A black hole approach"
When Frye heard he was scheduled for the Tallahassee trip, he asked a supervisor if he was required to fly it.
He had just arrived at the cargo airline's Memphis hub and wondered if he could be assigned to a flight a few hours later. A FedEx duty officer told him that was permitted because he had chosen to fly under reserve status, which allowed the company to change his schedule at the last minute.
A FedEx spokesman declined to comment for this story because the crash is under investigation.
The plane departed Memphis at 4:24 a.m. on July 26 and climbed to 29,000 feet. Frye flew the plane while Walsh handled radio duties. Sitting directly behind them was flight engineer David Mendez, who kept track of the fuel and electrical and hydraulic systems.
As they approached the Tallahassee airport in the darkness at about 5:30 a.m., the pilots chose not to land on Runway 27 because of slight winds at the airport. That runway has an Instrument Landing System that would have guided them to the runway with a moving target on the cockpit instrument panel. By keeping the target lined up properly, Frye could have maintained the proper descent directly to the runway.
Instead, they decided to land from the opposite direction on Runway 9.
It has a more basic way of guiding pilots to make a safe descent, a system called a Precision Approach Path Indicator or PAPI. It has bright red and white lights angled to show pilots when they are too high or too low.
If all four PAPI lights are red, the plane is too low. If they are all white, the plane is too high. Pilots are supposed to adjust their descent so they see two red and two white, which indicates the proper angle.
The FedEx pilots faced an additional challenge: the early-morning darkness. As they arrived over the sparsely populated Florida Panhandle, there was not much light from the ground. Pilots call it a "black hole approach."
Al Dickinson, the head of the University of Southern California Aviation Safety Program, says black hole approaches can be challenging.
"There's no horizon, nothing to orient you."
"The airplane is on fire!'
"FedEx 1478, turning final, Runway 9," Walsh said on the radio to alert other pilots who might have been in the area.
About 4 miles from the airport, the plane descended too low, according to NTSB calculations. The pilots should have seen four red lights at that point.
At first, it appeared Frye saw the warning. He added a little power to the engines and told the other pilots, "I'm gonna have to stay just a little bit higher or I'm gonna lose the end of the runway."
But he did not pull up, according to the plane's data recorder. The plane kept descending.
The pilots should have seen four red lights practically shouting at them for nearly 40 seconds, according to the NTSB calculations. But they say they never saw those lights.
Walsh said all three pilots followed standard procedure and were looking out the window as the plane approached the Tallahassee airport. They each saw the PAPI, but never saw it all red.
"Believe me, I have flown a lot of PAPIs," Walsh said. "If I saw a white light and the next one was even pink to red, I would make a correction. We never saw that. We never saw any indication we were below glide path."
The cockpit tape indicates that when the plane was about 2 miles away, Walsh said, "I think it's starting to disappear in there a little bit, isn't it?" He was referring to a slight mist that was obscuring the runway and the lights. But four seconds later on the tape, he seemed satisfied they could see the runway.
"I think we'll be all right," he said.
Eight seconds later, the plane hit some trees and exploded into flames.
Walsh remembers the thumps and the cockpit lights going out.
"It was pitch black," he said.
He climbed out a window and called back to the other pilots.
"Get out! Get out! The airplane is on fire!"
Frye and Mendez did not respond, so he helped them escape.
Testing the pilot's eyes
Shortly after the crash, the NTSB explored the possibility the PAPI lights had malfunctioned. But tests indicated they had been working.
Maciejewski, the attorney for the pilots, said the NTSB tests were inadequate because they did not replicate the nighttime conditions of the flight. He says the PAPI lights might have malfunctioned because of "contamination" on the lenses or because they had been banged by an airport lawn mower.
It will be a month or two before the NTSB determines the probable cause of the crash, but the documents released provide considerable evidence that Frye's colorblindness was a factor.
Colorblindness affects about 8 percent of men but less than 1 percent of women. It is a condition in which the eye has difficulty distinguishing colors.
NTSB officials said they could not recall other airline crashes caused by colorblindness, but they pointed to a 1996 train collision in New Jersey that was blamed on the engineer's inability to see a red stop signal. That accident killed three people and injured 158.
Several tests indicated Frye had a "severe" color problem, the Air Force vision experts said in a letter to the NTSB. They said he had "red-green defect" that could make it difficult to distinguish PAPI warning lights.
They said the severity of his problem had been undetected for much of his Navy career because Frye had passed a color test called the Farnsworth Lantern that doctors now believe is flawed.
It appears the Federal Aviation Administration granted him a waiver because a doctor concluded from Frye's Navy experience that he had sufficient color vision.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said FAA doctors did their best with the information they had.
"The system is designed to prevent pilots who are medically unfit from flying planes," Brown said. "But there is also a responsibility with the pilot to understand what his own deficiencies are."
But Maciejewski, the attorney, says Frye has "has a blue-green color problem" that would not affect his ability to see red.
"Sometimes pilots do mess up," he said. "This ain't one of them."
