Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport - Accidents and Incidents

Accidents and Incidents

• June 12, 1972, after a stopover in Detroit American Airlines Flight 96 a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 with 56 passengers and 11 crew from Los Angeles International Airport en route to Buffalo, New York suffered a cargo door failure and explosive decompression shortly after departure form Detroit Metropolitan Airport while flying over Windsor, Ontario. It is thus sometimes referred to as the Windsor incident. The Jumbo Jet sustained damage which left the pilots without full flight controls but the plane returned to Detroit for a successful emergency landing. There were no fatalities but several serious to minor injuries.
• July 31, 1972, Delta Air Lines Flight 841; members of the Black Liberation Army took over the airplane in flight using weapons smuggled on board, including a Bible cut out to hold a handgun. The plane held 7 crew and 94 passengers, none of whom was killed during the hijacking. Five hijackers who had boarded with three children took over the plane. The plane flew to Miami where the passengers were exchanged for $1 million in ransom. The plane was then flown on to Boston where it refueled before flying to Algeria. Algeria seized the plane and ransom which they returned to the U.S. but the hijackers were released after a few days.
• March 4, 1987, Northwest Airlink Flight 2268, operating under Fischer Brothers Aviation, a CASA 212 was on a scheduled flight from Mansfield to Detroit with an intermediate stop in Cleveland when it crashed while landing at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. The plane yawed violently to the left about 70 feet (21 m) above the runway, skidded to the right, hit 3 ground support vehicles in front of Concourse F and caught fire. Out of 19 occupants onboard (16 passengers and 3 crew), 9 were killed. The cause of the crash was determined to be pilot error.
• On August 16, 1987, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 operating as Northwest Airlines Flight 255, bound for Phoenix, Arizona, crashed on take-off from Metro's 8,500-foot (2,600 m)-long Runway 3 Center (Now Runway 3L). All but one passenger on the aircraft were killed; the lone survivor was a young girl, Cecelia Cichan, who lost both of her parents and her brother. The NTSB determined that the accident resulted from flight crew's failure to deploy the aircraft's flaps prior to take-off, resulting in a lack of necessary lift. The aircraft slammed into an overpass bridge on Interstate 94 just northeast of the departure end of the runway.
• On December 3, 1990, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-14 operating as Northwest Airlines Flight 1482, bound for Pittsburgh, collided with a Boeing 727–200 Adv. operating as Northwest Airlines Flight 299, bound for Memphis, on runway 03C. Seven passengers and a flight attendant on flight 1482 were killed. The cause of the accident is listed as "pilot error."
• On January 9, 1997, an Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia aircraft operating as Comair Flight 3272 crashed nose down 18 miles (29 km) from the airport while on approach into Detroit. All 26 passengers and 3 crew members were killed. The cause is listed to be the "FAA's failure to establish adequate aircraft certification standards for flight in icing conditions, the FAA's failure to ensure that an FAA/CTA-approved procedure for the accident airplane's deice system operation was implemented by U.S.-based air carriers, and the FAA's failure to require the establishment of adequate minimum airspeeds for icing conditions."
• On December 25, 2009, Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate an explosive device on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, an Airbus A330 from Amsterdam to Detroit as the plane was approaching Detroit. The device failed to go off correctly, and the suspect suffered burns to his lower body. Three other passengers had minor injuries. The White House said it considered the incident an attempted terrorist attack.
• On the night of Friday, August 3, 2012, according to a CNN online news report by Jake Carpenter which was updated at 1:23 AM early Saturday, August 4, 2012, two airplanes came too close to one another while attempting to land, a federal official said early Saturday (just days after a similar incident in Washington, D.C. at Reagan National Airport). A Delta Airlines flight from Phoenix, Arizona was coming in to land Friday night at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport as a small regional jet was trying to land, said Elizabeth Cory, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The two planes were separated by approximately two horizontal miles. Standard separation distance is three miles, Cory said, noting that an investigation is under way.