The preliminary report does not disclose a specific cause but reveals the struggles of passengers and crew stuck in upside-down wreckage.
nationalpost.com
"The two-person flight crew was a captain seated in the left seat and monitoring for the flight, and the first officer who was seated in the right seat and was the pilot.
The first officer at the controls had been with Endeavor Air for 13 months at the time of the crash. She holds an airline transport pilot certificate issued by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, and at the time of the crash had accumulated 1,422.3 hours total flight time, including 418.7 hours on the same type of aircraft that crashed, the report says.
She was on the last day of her five-day work cycle.
Her day started in Cleveland, on an 8:19 a.m. flight to Minneapolis that takes about two hours. That left her an hour and 48 minutes before her ill-fated trip to Toronto.
In the previous 30 days before the crash, she had conducted three round-trip flights into and out of Pearson. She had flown 56.3 hours in the previous 30 days, the report says.
The captain of the plane, who was not at the controls, has been with Endeavor since October 2007.
He also holds an airline transport pilot certificate issued by the FAA. He is also a flight simulator instructor. He had 3,570 hours total flight time, including 764 hours on the same aircraft type before the crash.
His day started in Minneapolis and the flight to Toronto was his first of the day. It was also his first flight in seven days; he had worked three days as an instructor and had flown just 3.5 hours in the previous 30 days.
The flight attendant at the front of the plane had three years of experience, all with Endeavor; the attendant in the back had 11 years of experience, five of them with Endeavor.
Their flight was uneventful until the last moments, the report says.
THE CRASH
The pilot received clearance to land on Runway 23 at Pearson airport at 2:12 p.m., using an automated runway approach assistance tool that sends information from the ground to give accurate vertical and horizontal guidance while landing.
According to the Endeavor Air flight manual for that type of aircraft, the airspeed for the final approach to landing should be set at 144 knots. The manual provides a formula for increasing the airspeed “in gusty wind conditions.”
The pilot set the airspeed to 144 knots. “Given the reported wind gusts, the approach was flown at 149 knots,” the report says.
At one second past 2:12 p.m., the plane descended to 500 feet above ground level at 150 knots. Five seconds later the pilot turned off the autopilot.
At 2:12 and 26 seconds, when the plane descended past 175 feet above ground level, the plane’s airspeed was 144 knots. Four seconds later, at 153 feet above the ground, its airspeed was 154 knots.
The pilot pulled back the thrust levers, reducing its thrust, and over the next five seconds, the airspeed began to decrease.
At 12:12:40 — that’s 3.6 seconds before touchdown — the aircraft was 50 feet above the runway, which sets off an alert for flight crews that the plane is 50 feet from ground. It’s an audible alert simply saying “Fifty.” Its airspeed was 145 knots and the rate of descent had increased.
Just one second later, the enhanced ground proximity warning system, an alarm that the plane is in danger, went off, warning of the plane’s “sink rate,” meaning it was going down too fast. The plane’s indicated airspeed was 136 knots.
The plane banked slightly to the right by 4.7 degrees.
The next second, at 2:12:42, the plane was slightly below the automated recommended glide path, but it was tracking the centre line of the runway, the report says.
The descent had increased and so did the banking to the right. It had twisted up to 5.9 degrees.
Less than a second before landing, the plane’s airspeed had dipped to 134 knots but the bank angle had grown to 7.1 degree and its nose was facing one degree up from the ground.
It touched the ground at 2:12:43.6 — a remarkably fine delineation of time. Because the plane was banking to the right, now at 7.5 degrees, it was the right main landing gear that hit the runway first.
A lot happened then, and investigators are not yet precisely sure in what order events occurred.
After contacting the runway, the side-stay attached to the right main landing gear broke, leaving it to fold back into its retracted position.
The wing root, an important part of the wing where it attaches to the airplane’s fuselage, fractured between the fuselage and where the landing gear extends from. Wing roots tend to bear the highest bending force in flight and in landing.
The wing detached from the plane, releasing a cloud of jet fuel, which caught fire.
Jolted and missing a wing, the plane slid along Runway 23. The left wing, still attached, would be still creating lift, the force that pushes a plane up. Without the balanced lift on the right, the plane rolled to the right, completely flipping it upside down.
Once inverted, a large portion of the plane’s tail detached.
The rest of the plane slid off the right side of the runway, travelling about 23 metres into snow-covered grass until it stopped on Runway 15L. The right wing and landing gear kept on going for another 65 metres.
The inverted landing left passengers and crew upside down and disoriented inside the wrecked plane, still, an evacuation began."
