Pinnacle Airlines Flight 3701

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Pinnacle Airlines Flight 3701
Summary
Date   October 14, 2004
Type   Engine Flameout
Site   Jefferson City, Missouri
Fatalities   2
Injuries   0
Aircraft
Aircraft type   Bombardier CRJ-200
Operator   Pinnacle Airlines
Tail number   N8396A
Passengers   0
Crew   2
Survivors   0

Pinnacle Airlines Flight 3701 (ICAO: FLG3701, IATA: 9E3701, or Flagship 3701) crashed on October 14, 2004, near Jefferson City, Missouri. It was an overnight deadhead flight (with no passengers) from Little Rock, Arkansas to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Both crew members were killed.

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[edit] The accident

Pinnacle Airlines (operating under the Northwest Airlink banner) Flight 3701 was an empty 50-seat Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet CRJ-200 (CL-600-2B19), N8396A, on ferry from Little Rock, Arkansas (Little Rock National Airport) to Minneapolis, Minnesota (Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport), manned by two pilots, Captain Jesse Rhodes and First Officer Peter Cesarz. The jet crashed when the engines could not be restarted and they could not glide to an airport. There were no casualties on the ground.

[edit] Why the plane was empty

The aircraft had previously required urgent but routine maintenance. As a result, it was unavailable for a flight earlier in the day. Pinnacle Airlines instead was forced to use the spare plane for the flight. The accident airplane was then required at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where it would have been had it undertaken its originally scheduled flight. As a result, it was necessary to fly the plane empty to Minneapolis.

[edit] Investigation

The investigation into the accident focused mainly on information contained on the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder. This is the official version of events as determined by that investigation.

The two pilots were hot-rodding the CRJ-200 on their deadhead flight. The pilots decided to test the limits of the CRJ, and join the "410 Club," referring to pilots who pushed CRJs to their maximum approved altitude of Flight Level 410, which is approximately 41,000 feet above mean sea level.

The incident started when the pilots performed excessive maneuvers at 15,000 feet, including a pitch-up at 2.3g (23 m/s²) that induced a stall warning. They set the autopilot to climb at 500 ft/min to FL410. This exceeded the manufacturer's recommended climb rate at altitudes above FL380. In the attempt to reach FL410, the plane was pushed at over 1.2g, and the angle of attack became excessive to maintain climb rate in the thinner upper atmosphere. After reaching FL410, the plane was cruising at 150 knots (280 km/h), barely above stall speed, and had over-stressed the engines. The anti-stall devices activated while they were at altitude, but the pilots overrode the automatic nose-down that would increase speed to prevent stall. After four overrides, both engines experienced flameout and shut down. The plane then stalled, and the pilots recovered from the stall at FL380 while still having no engines. This led the pilots to pitch nose down in an attempt to restart the engines. The crew failed to dive sharply enough to attain the required 300 kt for a windmill restart, ending the dive when they had reached 230 kt. The crew then tried to restart engines using the APU at 13,000 ft. This was again unsuccessful. They then declared to Air Traffic Control (ATC) that they had a single engine flameout. At this point they had 4 diversion airports available to them. As attempts to restart the engines continued to fail, they declared to ATC that they had in fact lost both engines, leaving only two possible emergency airports.

They crashed outside Jefferson City, Missouri, behind a row of houses (the 600 block of Hutton Lane — roughly two miles from Jefferson City Memorial Airport), and the plane caught fire, killing both pilots. No one on the ground was hurt.

[edit] Aftermath

Pinnacle Airlines has restricted flights to a maximum of FL370. It has also changed its training program to include high altitude operations in ground school and simulator training. In addition, each crew is taken in the simulator up to FL410 and shown what the airplane did on the night Flight 3701 crashed.

The NTSB has determined from the Flight Data Recorder that the turbofan jet engines (General Electric CF34-3B1) engine 2 turbine was operating at 300 °C above the maximum redline temperature of 900 °C at 41,000 ft. Engine 1 HPT stayed 100 °C below the redline.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

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