PSA Flight 182 - Accident

Accident

Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 was a popular early-morning commuter flight terminating at San Diego's Lindbergh Field. The flight originated in Sacramento on Monday, September 25, 1978, with a stopover in Los Angeles. At the controls were Captain James E. McFeron (with over 10,000 hours flying time in the B-727), co-pilot Robert E. Fox, and flight engineer Martin J. Wahne.

As they neared the end of their flight in full sunlight and clear weather conditions, with visibility extending 10 miles (16 km), the PSA crew was alerted by the approach controller about a small Cessna 172 Skyhawk aircraft nearby. The Cessna was being flown by two licensed pilots. One was 32-year-old Martin B. Kazy Jr., who possessed single-engine, multi-engine and instrument flight ratings, as well as a commercial certificate and an instrument flight instructor certificate. The other, 35-year-old David Boswell, a U.S. Marine Corps sergeant, possessed single-engine and multi-engine ratings and a commercial certificate and was at the time of the accident practicing ILS approaches under the instruction of Kazy in pursuit of his instrument rating. They had departed from Montgomery Field, and were navigating under VFR, which did not require the filing of a flight plan. Boswell was wearing a "hood" to limit his field of vision straight ahead to the cockpit panel, much like an oversize sun visor with vertical panels to block peripheral vision, as is normal in IFR training.

The PSA pilots reported that they saw the Cessna after being notified of its position by ATC, although cockpit voice recordings revealed that shortly thereafter the PSA pilots no longer had the Cessna in sight and they were speculating about its position. Lindbergh tower heard the 09.00:50 transmission as "He's passing off to our right" and assumed the PSA jet had the Cessna in sight.

After getting permission to land, and about 40 seconds before colliding with the Cessna, the conversation among the four occupants of the cockpit (captain, first officer, flight engineer and the off-duty PSA captain, Spencer Nelson, who was riding in the cockpit's jump seat) was as follows, showing the confusion:

Actually, the Cessna was directly in front of and below the Boeing, and the PSA jet was descending and rapidly closing in on the small plane, which had taken a right turn to the east, deviating from the assigned course. According to the report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Cessna may have been a difficult visual target for the jet's pilots, as it was below them and blended in with the multicolored hues of the residential area beneath; the Cessna's fuselage was yellow, and most of the houses were a yellowish color. Also, the apparent motion of the Cessna as viewed from the Boeing was minimized, as both planes were on approximately the same course. The report said that another possible reason that the PSA aircrew had difficulty observing the Cessna was that its fuselage was made visually smaller due to foreshortening. However, the same report in another section also stated that "the white surface of the Cessna's wing could have presented a relatively bright target in the morning sunlight."

A visibility study cited in the NTSB report concluded that the Cessna should have been almost centered in the windshield of the Boeing from 170 to 90 seconds before the collision, and thereafter it was likely positioned on the lower portion of the windshield just above the windshield wipers. The study also said that the Cessna pilot would have had about a 10-second view of the Boeing from the left-door window about 90 seconds before the collision, but visibility of the overtaking jet was blocked by the Cessna's ceiling structure for the remainder of the time.

Flight 182's crew never explicitly alerted the tower that they had lost sight of the Cessna. If they had made this clear to controllers, the crash might not have happened. Also, if the Cessna had maintained the heading of 70 degrees assigned to it by ATC instead of turning to 90 degrees, the NTSB estimates the planes would have missed each other by about 1000 feet (305 meters) instead of colliding. Ultimately, the NTSB maintained that regardless of that change in course, it was the responsibility of the crew in the overtaking jet to comply with the regulatory requirement to pass "well clear" of the Cessna.

Approach Control on the ground picked up an automated conflict alert 19 seconds before the collision but did not relay this information to the aircraft because, according to the approach coordinator, such alerts were commonplace even when there was no actual conflict. The NTSB stated: "Based on all information available to him, he decided that the crew of Flight 182 were complying with their visual separation clearance; that they were accomplishing an overtake maneuver within the separation parameters of the conflict alert computer; and that, therefore, no conflict existed."

This was the conversation in the PSA cockpit starting 16 seconds prior to collision with the Cessna:

PSA Flight 182 overtook the Cessna, which was directly below it, both approximately on a 090 (due east) heading. The collision occurred at approximately 2,600 feet (790 m) and broke the Cessna, and the 727's right wing and empennage, to pieces. According to several witnesses on the ground, there was first a loud metallic "crunching" sound, then an explosion and fire that drew them to look up.

Staff photographer Hans Wendt of the San Diego County Public Relations Office was attending an outdoor press event with a still camera, and was able to take two post-collision photographs of the falling 727, its right wing burning. Cameraman Steve Howell from local TV channel 39 was attending the same event, and captured the Cessna on film as it fell to earth. For its coverage of the disaster, The San Diego Evening Tribune, a predecessor to The San Diego Union-Tribune, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for "Local, General, or Spot News Reporting.

The wreckage of the Cessna plummeted to the ground, its vertical stabilizer torn from its fuselage and bent leftward, its debris hitting around 3,500 feet (1,100 m) northwest of where the 727 went down. PSA 182's right wing was heavily damaged, rendering the plane uncontrollable and sending it careening into a sharp right bank (clearly seen in the Wendt photos), and the fuel tank inside it ruptured and started a fire, when this final conversation took place inside the cockpit:

Flight 182 struck the ground 4830 meters (three miles) northeast of Lindbergh Field, in a residential section of San Diego known as North Park. It impacted at a 300mph, nose-down attitude while banked 50° to the right. Seismographic readings indicated that the impact occurred at 09:02:07, about 2.5 seconds after the cockpit voice recorder lost power. The jet impacted just west of the I-805 freeway, approximately nine meters (30 feet) north of the intersection of Dwight and Nile streets, with the bulk of the debris field spreading in a northeast to southwesterly direction towards Boundary Street. One of the plane's wings lodged in a house. The coordinates for the Boeing crash site are 32°44′37″N 117°07′14″W / 32.74361°N 117.12056°W / 32.74361; -117.12056Coordinates: 32°44′37″N 117°07′14″W / 32.74361°N 117.12056°W / 32.74361; -117.12056. The largest piece of the Cessna impacted about six blocks away near 32nd St. and Polk Ave. The explosion and fire from the 727 crashing created a mushroom cloud that could be seen for miles (and was photographed and filmed), and first responders on the scene reported that there was nothing left but utter destruction.

In total, 144 people lost their lives in the disaster, including Flight 182's seven crew members, 30 additional PSA employees deadheading to PSA's San Diego base, the two Cessna occupants, and seven residents (five women, two male children) on the ground. Among the victims on board PSA Flight 182 were Alan Tetelman, professor of metallurgy at UCLA and president of Failure Analysis Associates (now Exponent), who was en route to investigate a U.S. Navy helicopter crash; Charles Dunsmoor Bren, the 34-year-old son of actress Claire Trevor Bren; Richard "Ric" Horne, the 51-year-old brother of American mezzo-soprano opera singer Marilyn Horne; and Valerie Woods Kantor, the first wife of future United States Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor. An additional nine people on the ground were injured, and 22 homes across a four-block area were destroyed or damaged. One potential passenger, Jack Ridout, a survivor of the Tenerife airport disaster the year before, had also booked a ticket on Flight 182 from Los Angeles, but had cancelled his booking to leave for home the day before.

The accident was notable for the carnage it created. Only a few of the bodies were found recognizable and intact. First responders on the scene found pieces of bodies scattered throughout the area, including on rooftops and against trees, and gore splattered on walls. A police officer at the scene said that "there were no bodies to speak of - only pieces.... I was no stranger to dead bodies, but I wasn't ready to see the torso of a stewardess slammed against a car.... The heat of the fires and the sun made the whole scene surreal. We couldn't drink enough water. All around us was the stench of kerosene and burning flesh. We did our job by rote, locating the pieces so the SWAT team could mark the spot and cover the body parts".