A United Airlines jet flying from Venice, Italy, hit a bakery delivery truck and a light pole on the New Jersey Turnpike while landing at Newark Liberty International Airport on May 4, an incident that safety experts say came within feet of a major disaster. The Boeing 767 carried 231 people; none on board were injured. The truck driver was treated at a hospital for minor injuries.
“A major catastrophe was avoided by feet,” former United pilot Steve Arroyo told the Associated Press. “Had it been another five feet lower, eight feet, I mean, no more than 10 feet, that plane would have been all over the New Jersey Turnpike.”
The National Transportation Safety Board on Monday afternoon reclassified the event as an accident because of the extent of damage to the plane, the AP reported, though the agency provided no additional details. NTSB investigators arrived at the scene on Monday to interview the flight crew and begin determining what went wrong. The agency does not plan to hold news conferences and may not publish a preliminary report for roughly a month.
Dashboard camera video from inside the truck, posted by the AP, showed the driver singing to himself before glancing out his window with a look of concern as the jet’s engines grew louder. The plane then appeared in the driver’s side window and struck the vehicle. Semitrucks are typically 13.5 feet high, indicating how low the plane was flying.
Patrick Oyulu, a motorist on the turnpike, said he saw the aircraft come in almost directly over the highway. “I never expected a plane that low, and never expected I would see the undercarriage of a plane of that magnitude bearing overhead, with such noise and gust of wind,” Oyulu told the AP.
The pilots did not broadcast their damage report over the radio after landing, opting to call the tower by phone. But air traffic control audio published by ATC.com captured a controller saying more than half an hour later, “They felt something over the threshold and there’s a hole in the side of the airplane.” United and the NTSB have not confirmed that claim.
The flight landed on Runway 29, the shortest at Newark at 6,726 feet. The runway is generally used only when strong winds demand it. An air traffic controller that afternoon had told pilots winds were gusting up to 31 mph. Arroyo, who landed on Runway 29 often during his career, said investigators will examine how the crew prepared for that contingency and what data they entered into cockpit navigation systems. “The margin of error is extremely low,” he said.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA crash investigator, said fatigue could also be a factor after the long trans-Atlantic flight, the AP reported. The airline has put the pilots on leave while the investigation proceeds and preserved the cockpit voice and flight data recorders.
The near-catastrophe echoes a 1985 disaster at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, when a microburst slammed Delta Flight 191 into the ground, striking a vehicle and killing 137 people including the driver. That crash prompted sweeping changes in wind-shear detection and pilot training.