Turkish Airlines Flight 1951
On 25th February 2009, 135 passengers onboard of Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 traveled from Istanbul to Amsterdam. The Boeing 737 was descending rapidly through fog. The airplane was less than a mile away from the runway at Schiphol Airport when it suddenly crashed.
Turkish Airlines Flight 1951. Photo: collected.
When the plane impacted the ground it broke up into several pieces. The tail broke off and went at an angle, the cockpit broke off in a lateral standpoint and also had a lot of impact damage from the floor and below. Inside the cabin many passengers at first didn’t even realize what had happened. According to one of the passengers, Henk Heijloo, ‘I didn’t realize that there was a Sears excellence.’ Nine people are dead and almost everyone onboard suffers injuries.
Crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 1951. Photo: collected.
The way the plane dropped from the sky it fueled early speculation that a weather phenomenon called a microburst may be to blame. Why Planes Crash Aviation Analyst John Cox says, ‘A microburst is a condition usually created by thunderstorms where you have a column of air rushing downwards and can be very intense and have shoved airplanes literally into the ground in the past.’
The plane is destroyed, the scattered pieces give investigators their first clue as to what happened. The investigation was led by Dutch Safety Board assisted by a team of American NTSB and an expert from Turkish Airlines. Trying to find what really happened investigators located the cockpit voice recorder and flight data. After downloading the data it revealed a dangerous chain of events on Turkish Airlines Flight 1951. Joseph Sedor, Chief of Major Investigations, NTSB Office of Aviation Safety says, ‘As the aircraft was coming in, air traffic control positioned the aircraft in a manner that caused them to be high, so once they did that it required them to do a steep rate of descent.’
Crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 1951. Photo: collected.
The radio altimeter that is used to measure the plane's height above the ground has malfunctioned, it showed that the plane was on the ground where it actually was 2000 ft in the air. The pilots even recognized the problem but what they didn’t realize was that a faulty altimeter reading will have a dangerous effect on the auto throttle system. Auto throttle system controls the speed by adjusting engine thrust. There was another problem, the plane was nearing the runway but the crew wasn’t finished preparing for landing.
This accident led to significant changes to the industry, there was a recommendation that was made to improve reliability of the aircraft.
(For more information watch National Geographic Air Crash Investigations S10 titled “Who’s in control’ and read ‘Turkish Airlines 1951 accident report.’)
