Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751
Encyclopedia : S : SC : SCA : Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751
The Scandinavian Airlines System flight 751, a McDonnell Douglas MD-81 took off from the Stockholm-Arlanda Airport in Sweden on December 27 1991. It was piloted by the Danish captain Stefan Rasmussen Swedish first officer Ulf Cedermark. It was headed to Warsaw, Poland through Copenhagen, Denmark.
After 25 seconds of flight, noise and vibrations from the engines were first noticed. The flight crew responded by throttling down, but an automatic system simultaneously increased throttle as a response to increasing altitude. Problems with the other engine began 39 seconds later, and finally both engines failed at 76 and 78 seconds into flight.
A SAS flight captain who was on board as a passenger noticed the problems early and hurried to the cockpit to assist the crew. A nearby field in Gottröra, Uppland, was chosen for emergency landing. The plane hit the trees before touching down, losing a large part of the right wing. The plane broke into three parts before coming to a stop on the field.
25 people were injured, two of them seriously, but remarkably, nobody died in the accident, which is known as Gottröraolyckan (the Gottröra accident). One of the reasons for the high survival rate was that passengers used the brace position.
The crash was later found to have been caused by ice from the wings which had entered both rear-mounted engines. Apparently the maintenance crew had failed to notice the ice which had formed during the night before when temperature decreased below freezing point. After the crash, airports and airlines operating in cold regions had to re-evaluate and modify their de-icing precautions. The flight crew, on the other hand, received praise for the skilled emergency landing in a potentially fatal situation.
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.