Newsgroups: sci.aeronautics.airliners Path: news From: rbarnick@mitre.org (Barnick, R.) Subject: 737 Crash In Colorado Springs X-Submission-Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1992 20:05:35 GMT Message-ID: Approved: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM Followup-To: sci.aeronautics.airliners Organization: MITRE Sender: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM X-Submission-Message-Id: Date: 10 Dec 92 16:07:19 PST In March 1991 a UAL 737 went down on final approach into COS. The final accident investigation report was released a couple of days ago and carried no cause. About four months ago a TWA flight leaving COS picked up a federal investigator working the accident. The investigator sat up front in the jump seat. The TWA flight deck crew wanted to know how the investigation was going. The following was relayed to me via one of the flight crew members. UAL recently lost some kind of case from its female employees which charged gender discrimination. UAL either lost or agreed to settle out of court. UAL agreed to correct conditions which caused the suit. One correction was to get more females in the cockpit. The ill-fated 737 had a very junior female first officer. The pilot was male and also junior. Cockpit voice recordings (never yet fully released to public) indicated that when the crew was informed of very gusty wind conditions in the COS area, they seemed overly concerned. They kept commenting about the wind. These frequent comments seemed irregular to the investigators. Experienced pilots wouldn't have spent so much time discussing the wind. On final it was speculated the aircraft took a good jolt from an air current or eddy. The crew, having psyched themselves up substantially, reacted in some uncoordinated knee-jerk fashion resulting in the fatal error. The investigator went on to say that even if this sort of story could be proven, it would never be made public. To do would discredit UAL's gender action, UAL's training, FAA's certification, and maybe further hurt an already hurting industry. It seems odd that the final accident report that came out indeed did say nothing. Please remember, this is a story told me second hand. You're getting it third hand. But, if any truth about this crash is known, a sharing thought would be interesting.