The Primary Cause Of The Accident As Cited By The NTSB

AVIATION ACCIDENT STUDY
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Institutional Affiliation:
Aviation Accident Study
1/13/82 Air Florida Flight 90 NTSB/AAR-82-8
Introduction
Human errors remain an aspect that has been implicated as a causative factor in close to 80% of the military and civil aviation accidents as established by NTSB. However, most of these accidents reporting systems are never designed around theoretical frameworks on human error. Given this, most accidents databases are perceived as unfavorable to the traditional methods of human error analysis, thus making the identification of these interceptive measures onerous. This paper therefore seeks to underpin factors that contributed to Air Florida Flight 90’s flight accident with the primary objective of circumventing some of the actions that could have been taken to avoid the incident.
Aviation Accident Study
On the 13th of January 1982, the Air Florida Flight 90 which was a Boeing 737-222 took off from Washington National Airport (DCA). The airliner had a flight crew of two attendants and cabin crew servicers, carrying a population of 74 passengers enroute to Florida, with a stop at Tampa. According to the NTSB, some of the factors that resulted to the incident that saw Air Florida’s Flight 90 crash were the flight crew’s failure to make use of the anti-ice engine during the takeoff and ground operation of the aircraft (NTSB Aircraft Accident Report 1982). The flight crew’s decision to takeoff with snow on the plane’s airfoil surfaces and the captain’s failures to castoff the takeoff during the early stages when their attention was called for in regard to the anomalous engines instrumental readings are perceived as other factors that resulted in the crash. In addition to this, it is important to consider that the prolonged ground delays in the airport between the receipt of ATC takeoff and deicing resulted in the exposure of the airplanes engine to a continual precipitation, an aspect that resulted in the slowness of the engines to pick up.
According to Boyd & Stolzer (2016), this patch-up remains an inherent characteristic of the B-737 aircrafts especially when the leading edge receives the slightest contamination with small amounts of ice or snow. The limited experience of the pilots on the use of the aircraft’s systems during winter operations is another contributor to the accident. In accordance to my view, the accumulation of slow on the airings fuselage and wings and the failure of the flight crew in activating the plane’s engine deicing system even after the engines were de-iced remains the single cause of the accident, an aspect that coheres with the findings of the NTSB(NTSB Aircraft Accident Report 1982). On the other hand, the cause of this accident can be attributed to the bad weather and the failure of the flight crew’s capability in assessing and ensuring that all the places systems were functional amid...