Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751
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 Dana Viking after the crash. |
|
| Summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | December 27, 1991 |
| Type | Propulsion loss |
| Site | Gottröra, Sweden |
| Fatalities | 0 |
| Injuries | 25 |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | McDonnell-Douglas MD-81 |
| Operator | Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) |
| Tail number | OY-KHO |
| Ship name | Dana Viking |
| Passengers | 122 |
| Crew | 7 |
| Survivors | 129 |
The Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751, a McDonnell Douglas MD-81, took off from the Stockholm-Arlanda Airport, Sweden, in the early morning of December 27, 1991. The airliner was piloted by Danish captain Stefan G. Rasmussen and Swedish first officer Ulf Cedermark. It was headed to Warsaw, Poland through Copenhagen, Denmark.
After 25 seconds of flight, noise and vibrations from the engines were first noticed. The flight crew responded by throttling down, but an automatic system simultaneously increased throttle as a response to increasing altitude. An SAS flight captain who was on board as a passenger noticed the problems early and hurried to the cockpit to assist the crew. Problems with the other engine began 39 seconds later, and finally both engines failed at 76 and 78 seconds into flight, at 3000 feet of altitude.
The pilot responded to the engine loss by pitching the aircraft down before leveling it, to try and make the aircraft glide the longest possible distance without stalling. The pilots requested a return to Arlanda and attempted the restart procedure[1], but with the plane breaking through the cloud cover at 600 feet, the pilot chose an opening in the forest, in Gottröra, Uppland, for the immediate emergency landing.
The plane hit the trees before touching down, losing a large part of the right wing. The plane broke into three parts before coming to a stop on the field. 25 people were injured, two of them seriously, but remarkably, nobody died in the accident, which is known in Sweden as Gottröraolyckan (the Gottröra accident). One of the reasons for the high survival rate was that passengers used the brace position.
The crash was later found to have been caused by ice from the wings which had entered both rear-mounted engines. Apparently the maintenance crew had failed to notice the ice which had formed during the night before when temperature decreased below freezing point. The flight crew received praise for the skilled emergency landing in a potentially fatal situation.
After the Gottröra accident, airports and airlines operating in cold regions had to re-evaluate and modify their deicing procedures.
[edit] External links and references
- ^ Cockpit Voice Recorder transcript for SK 751 Hosted at aviation-safety.net
