WMAQ-TV—Chicago, IL
CHICAGO - A 6-year-old boy was killed when a jetliner trying to land in heavy snow slid into a busy street, hitting one vehicle and pinning another beneath it.
Two passengers on the Boeing 737 suffered minor injuries, and eight people in the two vehicles outside Midway International Airport were hurt in the incident, authorities said. Five people were in one vehicle, four in the other.
The child, a 6-year-old boy, was dead on arrival at Advocate Christ Medical Center, hospital spokeswoman Deborah Song said. Two adults and two other children were at the hospital, their conditions ranging from serious to good, she said.
A nursing supervisor at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park said an 8-year-old girl was being treated there late Thursday night.
Midway Airport reopened at about 6 a.m. Friday, NBC5 reported.
Passenger Mike Abate, 35, of suburban Milwaukee said after the landing he saw a father carrying an injured child and other people being taken away in an ambulance. "That was the toughest part. We were safe on the plane, but the toughest part was to realize that someone was under the belly of the plane," Abate said.
The Southwest Airlines 737 skidded through a fence at the southwest corner of the airport, coming to rest on Central Avenue near 55th Street. At least one car was struck by the plane and was lodged under the aircraft's front end. The incident occurred at approximately 7:20 p.m. The plane will remain at that intersection overnight, NBC5's Phil Rogers reported.
The plane was apparently unable to stop in the heavy snow. At the time the accident happened, the winds were blowing out of the east, and so the airplane had a tailwind, which is not ideal for landing conditions, Rogers reported. At the time the accident occurred, visibility was almost zero for the people in the control tower, which is not an unusual situation, Rogers reported. Controllers didn't know that the plane had slid off the runway until the pilot radioed them to tell the tower.
At a news conference in Dallas, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said the jetliner's captain had been flying for about a decade and the first officer had about 2½ years' experience. He did not name them.
Southwest flies an all-737 fleet with more than 400 aircraft.
National Transportation Safety Board and FAA officials from Washington were on the way to Chicago to investigate.
Larry Langford, spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department, said a second vehicle was also involved in the accident, but appeared to be off to the side of the road.
Langford reported that passengers from the plane were taken off and brought to warming buses by 7:50 p.m.
A witness told NBC5 that the entire jet went through the fence and onto the roadway.
A passenger aboard the plane, identified as "Katie," told NBC5 that everyone on the plane was calm during the ordeal.
"We were just landing; we were in a holding pattern because there was a lot of snow on the runway," she said. "It was a little bit rough, but it was nothing out of the ordinary ... it got really bumpy and then we heard a crashing sound, and the next thing I knew, it looked like we were in the middle of an intersection."
"We were in line for an approach with other planes," said another passenger. "They landed first, and I guess ice had built up on the runway. We came in, we landed, we ran out of runway and hit the wall."
Rogers reported that the runway was more a mile long, which is usually more than enough runway to land a plane. The braking action, however, was described as being fair to good, which would have been transmitted to the pilots, Rogers reported.
The aircraft was identified as Southwest Flight 1248, arriving in Chicago from Baltimore with 98 passengers onboard.
Firefighters were assisting people who might have been injured on the street, she said, and NBC5 learned that emergency crews were removing a victim from the passenger's side of a car involved in the collision.
Langford said that there was no fire involved in the collision, although there was a small fuel leak. That leak, he said, was quickly contained.
Langford said that 55th Street will be shut down for a long while as the accident is investigated.
Midway was closed until further notice as of 9 p.m., Abrams said. But the FAA Web site said the airport would reopen at 6 a.m. Friday.
The accident occurred 33 years to the day after a crash at Midway that killed 45 people, two of them on the ground.
In that crash, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 533 was instructed by the control tower to execute a "missed approach" pattern. The pilot applied full power to go around for another landing attempt.
A little more than a mile from the airport, the airliner struck tree branches, then hit the roofs of a number of neighborhood bungalows before plowing into a home, bursting into flames. Eighteen passengers survived.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10388519/from/RL.1/
