TURKISH AIRLINES FLIGHT 1951
Crashed short of runway: February 25, 2009, In Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
On February 25, 2009, Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 was en route from Istanbul, Turkey, to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. The Boeing 737-800 was carrying 127 passengers – four of whom were U.S. citizens – and seven crew members, including three pilots. The seemingly ordinary journey was uneventful until the aircraft descended for landing on Runway 18R. At approximately 1,950 feet, a faulty radio altimeter inaccurately assessed the plane’s altitude causing the autothrottle to decrease prematurely, reducing engine power to idle during approach.
The autothrottle system is an essential mechanism on an aircraft that automatically adjusts the engine power throughout a flight. The crew did not notice that the throttle had automatically gone idle until it was too late to increase the thrust and take the appropriate corrective action to recover the aircraft and avoid a stall. The aircraft reached a critically low speed, stalling and ultimately crashing on muddy farmland short of the runway, sliding through farmland before splintering into three pieces.
Miraculously, a fire did not erupt, but the impact killed nine people, including several Americans. Three pilots were among those killed, crushed by a panel that slammed through the cockpit. Dozens more were critically injured.
To worsen the circumstances, confusing instructions from the Schiphol Control Center dispatched ambulances and rescue crews to the wrong location, resulting in a 30-minute delay before emergency services reached the crash site. Helicopters arrived 55 minutes after the crash when it could have taken 10 minutes for airlift rescuers to arrive. Surrounding hospitals were not properly alerted to the tragedy and personnel had no idea that a plane had crashed despite 82 ambulances being at the crash site.
The United States National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration dispatched investigators to assist the Dutch Safety Board in the investigation regarding the probable cause of the crash. The airplane’s digital flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered. An investigation of the flight data by the Dutch Safety Board revealed that the plane was about 2,000 feet above the ground and on its final landing when the reading on a faulty left-hand altimeter suddenly changed, from 1,950 feet to –8 feet altitude. The speed reduction was so large that the aircraft’s wings could not provide enough lift, causing it to crash.
As a result of this tragic crash, the aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, issued a bulletin to remind pilots of all 737 aircraft of the importance of monitoring airspeed and altitude, further advising against the use of autopilot and autothrottle when landing in cases of radio altimeter discrepancies. However, a New York Times article, published on January 21, 2020, examined what caused this plane to plummet into a field and found that Boeing was also responsible for the crash. In a lengthy story, the reporter stated, “Decisions by Boeing, including risky design choices and faulty safety assessments, also contributed to the accident on the Turkish Airlines flight. But the Dutch Safety Board either excluded or played down criticisms of the manufacturer in its final report after pushback from a team of Americans that included Boeing and federal safety officials, documents and interviews show.”
The article goes on to compare whether the mistakes of the Turkish crash led to the same problems of the Boeing planes in the Boeing 737 Max aircraft. “A review by The New York Times of evidence from the 2009 accident, some of it previously confidential, reveals striking parallels with the recent crashes — and resistance by the team of Americans to a full airing of findings that later proved relevant to the Max,” the reporter wrote. “In the 2009 and Max accidents, for example, the failure of a single sensor caused systems to misfire, with catastrophic results, and Boeing had not provided pilots with information that could have helped them react to the malfunction. The muted criticism of Boeing after the 2009 accident fits within a broader pattern, brought to light since the Max tragedies, of the company benefiting from a light-touch approach by safety officials.” Clifford Law Offices represented numerous victims and their families from Turkish Airlines Flight 1951, ultimately recovering a combined settlement.