NARRATOR: A commuter plane circles outside Chicago,
waiting for clearance to land.
Without warning, the controls snap to the right.
(SCREAMING)
The plane plunges straight for the ground.
(GRUNTS)
The behaviour of the crew and the air traffic controllers
would be examined.
The crash makes 'Roselawn' one of aviation's darkest words.
It's mid-afternoon on October 31, 1994.
American Eagle Flight 4184 left Indianapolis, Indiana
15 minutes ago.
It's heading to Chicago.
There are 68 passengers and crew on board.
Flying through the clouds,
the aircraft begins to experience some turbulence.
I'm going to keep them in their seats in this chop.
No sense in taking chances.
Captain Orlando Aguiar is in command of today's flight.
It's supposed to be his day off.
He volunteered for this flight to make extra money.
His wife is expecting their second child.
See if we can get above this.
Center, any chance Flight 184 cam climb to 1,600?
(MAN ON RADIO SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
First Officer Jeff Gagliano is handling the flying duties
on this leg of the flight.
He programs the autopilot to climb to a less turbulent altitude.
Jeff actually was working on his dad's ranch in Wisconsin
just before he came in for that trip on Halloween that day.
Getting on a horse or getting in an airplane -
those were two of the things that Jeff loved most.
Flight 4184 is an ATR 72,
a groundbreaking new aircraft built in France.
Cost-efficient and comfortable,
the plane has become popular on short runs.
This flight is just one of five short hops the crew will be making today.
Aguiar and Gagliano have flown this route countless times
and know it by heart.
When you're flying from Indianapolis to Chicago,
you're flying through some of the busiest air space in the world.
As Flight 4184 approaches Chicago O'Hare,
the pilots begin the descent to 10,000 feet.
Chicago Center, we have discretion down to 10,000.
We're on our way down now.
In Chicago, controller Michelle Wilman is returning from a break.
The trainee controller
is still working under the supervision of a monitor.
She's told that traffic into O'Hare is facing potential delays
because of weather.
She will have to be prepared to put some flights on hold.
Operations into and out of O'Hare are handled on a priority basis.
It's not necessarily a 'first come, first served' basis.
International flights arriving to O'Hare because of their fuel status
get priority,
and then the turbo props come in at the end.
Eagle 184, hold south-east
on Victor seven.
Chicago Center, roger. Hold south-east on Victor seven.
Eagle 184.
Flight 4184 must now fly a racetrack-shaped holding pattern
over north-western Indiana.
Aguiar programs the autopilot to keep the plane circling at 10,000 feet.
I'll go up front, see if they want anything.
(COUNTRY MUSIC PLAYS ON STEREO)
The crew has little to do
as they wait for air traffic controllers
to give them permission to land.
- Can I get you boys anything? - I'm good.
Stereo? (LAUGHS) You don't have a hard job.
We do have it pretty easy.
(SWITCHES MUSIC OFF)
This thing gets a real high-deck angle in these turns.
Yeah.
We're just wallowing in the air right now.
- You want flaps 15? - Bring the nose down.
Sure.
I guess Sandy's going "Ooh" now. (LAUGHS)
(BEEPING)
- See y'all. - Alright.
The crew needs to let the airline know about their delay.
It could affect the rest of the day's schedule.
Crews use text messages to communicate with dispatchers
so they don't tie up radio frequencies.
Should I let 'em know how much fuel we've got?
Sure.
Space F-U-E-L. Is that...
We've got 3,600lb.
That's much nicer. Flaps 15.
Sure. Once they let us out of the hold and forget they're down,
we'll get the overspeed warning.
You haven't heard any more from this controller chick, huh?
No. Not a word.
Eagle Flight 184, descend and maintain 8,000.
Copy. 8,000, Eagle 184.
Eagle Flight 184, should be about 10 minutes till you're cleared in.
Thank you.
The flight is allowed to descend.
- Are we out of the hold? - No. Just going down to 8,000.
- (ALARM BEEPS) - Then a warning.
I knew we'd do that.
The plane is going too fast to fly with its flaps extended.
I was trying to keep it at 180.
Gagliano retracts the flaps.
There's a strange sound coming through the fuselage.
(MUFFLED RATTLES)
Suddenly the control column turns sharply to the right.
(SCREAMING)
The controls won't budge.
(SCREAMING)
The plane is falling from the sky.
The pilots begin to recover control.
But then it happens again.
ELECTRONIC VOICE: Terrain. Pull up.
- Terrain. Pull up. - Why isn't it?
Terrain. Pull up. Terrain. Pull up.
MAN: It was coming down too steep to even try to land.
It was coming down at an... I mean, a sharp angle.
Real sharp angle.
Flight 4184 has crashed into a field
just outside Roselawn, Indiana.
Oh, my God. They're dead. They have to be.
For the speed that it was coming down at.
Hundreds of volunteers arrive at the crash site to offer help.
But there's nothing they can do.
MAN: There was not much to see of any airplane.
You couldn't see no cabin or anything of the airplane.
There just wasn't anything left of it.
Both pilots, the two flight attendants and all 64 passengers
are dead.
The Roselawn crash would soon become
one of the most important accidents in aviation history.
It will lead investigators to new conclusions
about a string of older crashes.
(HELICOPTER APPROACHES)
The morning after the crash of American Eagle Flight 4184.
A team from the National Transportation Safety Board
is on the scene,
just outside Roselawn, Indiana.
Greg Feith is the lead investigator.
The morning that we arrived at the accident site,
it was cold, it was overcast, it was one of those drizzly, dank days.
All you could smell was the jet air, the kerosene fuel
and because it was muddy and wet,
you had that odour, that aroma of dirt.
And so with all of those smells,
that...I mean, that really evokes some emotion there.
And now you have to walk through that field
and actually start to do your job.
The crash site is soaked in jet fuel and hydraulic fluid.
Human remains are scattered everywhere.
The site is declared a biohazard.
With 4184, it was one of those types of accidents
where there was very little left of the airplane.
Investigators know that the way the wreckage is spread out
can tell them how the plane hit the ground.
Because there was a fan-shaped debris pattern
and it was spread out over a very large area,
we knew that the impact was very shallow but at very high speed.
The airplane's two flight recorders are found intact in the tail.
They're taken to the NTSB's labs for analysis.
The data on the recorders could provide the clues
investigators need to solve the mystery.
But extracting the data takes time.
In the meantime, investigators look
for the location of key pieces of wreckage.
MAN: The first things we typically look for
are the four corners of the airplane.
The NTSB's Bob Swaim leads that search.
You're looking for the nose and the tail and the two wing tips.
Because if you can tell where the four corners of the airplane are,
you get an initial idea of whether the pilot was in control or not.
The plane's four corners are far from each other.
The nose and cockpit are completely destroyed.
This tells investigators that the plane hit the ground nose-first
in a shallow but rapid descent.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
The fact that the plane wasn't in a steep descent on impact
indicates that the pilots had some control
in the final seconds before the crash.
They just ran out of room to pull up.
ELECTRONIC VOICE: Pull up.
Investigator Bob Swaim meanwhile
has recovered some of the plane's instruments,
including its attitude director indicator,
also known as the 'artificial horizon'.
It's a key instrument that tells pilots if they're flying level.
If it malfunctioned,
it could have misled the crew and caused them to make mistakes.
We had a pretty good idea of the attitude of the airplane at impact
so it would really help at that point
to see if the pilots had the same view of the flight
that we found as they hit the ground.
Get the lights for me.
A lot of the cockpit pieces use a fluorescent paint
or something similar.
And when they contact each other, little bits of the paint transfer.
If we look at those with a black light,
we can see things that the naked eye cannot see.
There's a good imprint here.
The force of the impact has left tiny scratches
on the shattered instrument.
Swaim discovers that the attitude indicator
seems to have been working.
Its final readings show the plane was levelling off.
The instrument coincides with the plane's actual position on impact.
It indicated that at least the flight instruments
that the pilots would've been looking at were appropriate.
They were proper. That the pilots had something to fly by.
The discovery means that the pilots knew
their plane was diving towards the ground.
Investigator Greg Feith is getting a clearer picture
of the flight's final seconds.
Now he wants to know about the history of this flight
before it fell from the sky.
One of the elements of the investigation, of course,
was to look at air traffic control.
Eagle 184, hold south-east on...
Feith learns that Flight 4184
had been in a holding pattern south-east of Chicago
for 39 minutes before the crash.
When we looked at the air traffic control records,
we found that the flow rate -
that is, the number of airplanes
that were going into Chicago O'Hare at the time -
had to be reduced because of the weather moving through the area.
Well, folks, I do regret to inform you
that air traffic control has put us into a holding pattern up here.
And because of the reduced rate into Chicago,
we knew that 4184 was gonna have to hold for a very long period of time.
One of the aspects that we found
was that one of the controllers in the facility
was relatively new - they were considered a trainee.
Had an inexperienced controller put Flight 4184 in peril?
Chief Investigator Greg Feith
wants to know more about the weather conditions
along the holding pattern.
I want weather data.
Pilot reports. The atmospheric conditions.
Doppler radar. Anything you can find.
Flight 4184 wasn't the only plane circling O'Hare that day.
Several other planes were also on hold.
They all landed safely.
Interviews with the pilots of some of those planes
give investigators an important clue.
One after another, they all experienced icing,
some as much as three quarters of an inch.
Many of the pilots report the same thing - ice.
Dr Marcia Politovich
works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
She's one of the leading experts on icing
and the danger it poses to aircraft.
It essentially changes the shape of the wing while you're in flight.
It creates drag, it reduces lift,
it causes performance and handling problems
and it's just not a good thing to have.
Investigators examine weather records from the day of the crash.
They find a disturbing pattern
of reports of icing all along a cold front near Chicago.
But the reports describe the icing as light to moderate.
Perhaps the size of the commuter plane was a factor in this crash.
Different planes respond to icing differently.
A large plane will respond differently than a small plane.
Reasons for that are both environmental
and having to do with the airframe itself.
Large jets generally fly above the dangerous conditions inside a cloud.
But the ATR 72 can't do that.
Smaller planes can't fly as high.
They're stuck in the icing environment for longer.
They may not have de-icing equipment
and if they get in trouble,
they may not have enough excess power to get out of it.
Investigators discover that Flight 4184's holding pattern
took it through layers of cloud repeatedly.
Each time it would have been exposed to icing conditions.
4184 we knew had been holding in an icing event.
There were layers of clouds that they had been flying in and out of.
Steve Fredrick was flying out of Chicago on the morning of the crash.
He flew through the same treacherous weather.
Each time that I went through that cold front during that day,
the weather was intensifying.
The ice was getting worse and I was getting more and more concerned.
Fredrick asked his captain to pass on a warning about the weather
so that other pilots would be alerted to the danger.
I found out a little bit later
that my captain had never warned dispatch
and these pilots never got the warning
about the ice that was out there that day
and there's no feeling in the world
that can compare to how badly I felt at that moment.
Greg Feith knows that controllers had put several other planes
into a holding pattern near Chicago.
But they all landed safely after coming out of the hold.
This means the controller had not put Flight 4184 in jeopardy.
She acted correctly,
given the information she had about the weather.
One of the issues about air traffic control
is that the controllers can't just look at their radar screen
and identify areas of precipitation or icing conditions readily.
The controllers don't know
that an airplane is sitting in icing conditions
unless the pilot provides them with what they call a PIREP,
or a pilot report.
So if the crew - in this case, 4184 -
doesn't provide that information to the controller,
then the controller doesn't know
that an icing event actually is occurring out there.
Feith and his team wonder if the flight crew simply didn't realise
they were flying into icy conditions.
The plane's cockpit voice recorder provides the answer.
WOMAN: (ON RECORDING) Can I get you boys anything?
- AGUIAR: (ON RECORDING) I'm good. - (MUSIC PLAYS)
Stereo? (LAUGHS) You don't have a hard job.
We do have it pretty easy.
FEITH: The First Officer was listening to some music.
We knew that there were a lot of non-aviation things going on.
One of the most contentious elements
was how did that affect the crew's performance
and their awareness to the situation that was starting to develop?
- It's much nicer now. Flaps 15. - Yeah.
Showing some ice now.
But nine minutes before the crash,
the crew had noticed their plane was picking up ice.
The pilots must have been aware
they were flying through an area of aircraft icing.
You haven't heard any more from this controller chick, huh?
No. Not a word.
Then, two minutes before the accident,
another remark draws the attention of investigators.
Still got ice.
I see what you mean.
The crew knew about the ice.
Now investigators need to know what they did about it.
The ATR 72 is equipped with sophisticated de-icing devices.
It's crucial to know what the crew did
about the ice build-up on their wings.
This time, the flight data recorder provides the answers.
(BEEPING)
Almost 17 minutes before the crash,
something sets off the master caution warning.
It could signal a problem in one of the plane's systems.
It could also mean the electronic ice detector
is picking up the presence of ice.
The flight data recorder shows investigators
that in response to the alert,
Captain Aguiar turned the plane's de-icing system
to its maximum setting.
The NTSB's Charley Pereira looks into the performance of the ATR 72.
The complete ice protection system on the ATR 72 airplane
consists of a combination of what we call 'anti-icing',
which are hot surfaces that don't allow the ice to form
on the windshields
and the propellers are also heated on this airplane.
And then they have de-ice systems,
which are on the leading edges of the wings,
what are called pneumatic boots.
They're like rubber inflatable chambers
that you blow air into and they expand kind of like a balloon
and that cracks the ice
and then the ice flies off the airplane.
The flight data recorder shows
that after he activated his de-icing system,
Captain Aguiar also pushed the throttle forward slightly,
increasing the plane's speed.
This increased the speed of the air moving over the plane's wings,
making it harder for ice to settle there.
The pilots had done everything they could
to deal with ice build-up on the plane.
But were the anti-icing systems actually working?
The shattered remains of that de-icing system
are now the main focus of the investigation.
MAN: The airplane was designed in France
by a group of French and Italian companies.
The de-icing system was part of that design.
So the components were made by small French vendors
who were located around the countryside
and then they were assembled there in Toulouse
into the final airplane.
(MEN MURMUR)
Bob Swaim arrives in France with pieces of the de-icing system.
I've brought some pieces from Flight 4184 to look at.
The key component to the de-icing system
is probably not the black rubber boot
that you see on the airplane,
but the timer that's inside the airplane -
or timers - and the valves that control those boots.
The force of the crash
has left telltale markings called 'index marks'.
They show the position of the valves at the time of impact.
Swaim compares them to the original blueprints.
Does anything seem out of the ordinary?
The trip to France has led to yet another dead end.
There was nothing wrong with the plane's de-icing system.
Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
Investigators are puzzled.
Showing some ice now.
If the crew knew they had ice on their wing
and their de-icing system was working,
why did the plane crash?
Other pilots think they know the answer
and decide to speak out.
Their decision will dramatically change
the course of this investigation.
Three weeks after the crash near Roselawn, Indiana,
American Eagle pilot Steve Fredrick distributes a warning.
It says the ATR 72 fleet operated by American Eagle
is dangerous in icing conditions.
It claims American Eagle pilots
have pleaded with the airline and regulators
to do something about it,
but to no effect.
I drafted and distributed a brochure in Chicago O'Hare Airport
which essentially warned people
about the problems with the ATR aircraft
and made an outreach to the public
in order to try and get something done
because nothing was happening.
A month after the crash,
pilot frustration over the ATR's airworthiness boils over.
A group of a dozen pilots refuse to fly,
citing risky weather.
The airline is forced to cancel flights
and then Steve Fredrick goes one step further.
He voices his concerns on a US network morning show.
We were told this airplane will try and kill you if you get too slow.
In ice, the airplane will have
a nasty tendency to go out of control.
When I came back to flying
after my appearance on 'Good Morning America',
I was summarily suspended without pay.
The public protest leads investigators to wonder
if the ATR 72 has a deadly vulnerability to ice.
Merci.
Investigator Charley Pereira visits the ATR's French manufacturer,
Aerospatiale, to learn more about the plane's history.
We embarked on a research effort
to try to identify
all previous ATR 42 and 72 roll control incidents.
He finds a disturbing pattern.
And about five of those were found to be similar
after the fact in our review to the Roselawn case.
One such incident took place in December 1988
in Mosinee, Wisconsin.
An American Eagle ATR 42
had been preparing to land in icy conditions
at Central Wisconsin Airport.
The airplane was on approach in severe icing conditions
described as "freezing drizzle and freezing rain".
Captain Mike Bodak was the pilot that day.
We were just on the last two legs of our trip
before we'd be done with work
and we were doing our descent.
Everything was proceeding normally.
Negative ice. Just wet.
I'll call the flight centre and let them know we're turning inbound.
I hear in the tail a sound -
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh -
like that but it just got louder and louder.
(LOUD SHUDDERING)
We have no idea what is occurring.
I thought, initially, a propeller blade may have come off.
It was as if the steering wheel wasn't connected to anything.
The plane stalls.
Its wings can't generate enough lift to keep it in the air.
As I see I'm not getting any of the airplane back,
I come up on the bar levers all the way.
The engines are now really trying to fly.
At this point, I'm getting some of the airplane back
so I make a forward motion to try and break the stall
and it's still going "Terrain, terrain"
and I don't have the airplane back yet.
- And my First Officer says... - We're up.
And I say, "Max RPM."
ELECTRONIC VOICE: Terrain. Terrain.
He throws the props from 86 to 100%.
And instantaneously, boom, we fly out of the stall.
Whew!
The plane is less than 1,200ft above the ground.
Captain Bodak has learned a sobering lesson about the ATR.
There was no warning.
The plane stalled without any warning.
Planes do have warnings for stalls,
but in this case, there was no warning.
I got...
The first warning that I was in a stall
was I was in a stall.
But other pilots weren't as lucky.
An ATR 42 operated by an Italian airline was flying over the Alps
en route to Germany in October 1987.
The plane lost control and crashed in the mountains,
killing all 37 people onboard.
Ice was the main factor.
But the final report blamed pilot procedures.
For investigators, it's really important to look back
at historical information about any airplane.
You want to look for trends.
Charley Pereira wants to know if the engineers who built the plane
could explain why an ATR 72 would go so badly out of control.
To his surprise,
he learns they knew that it had a susceptibility to icing.
PEREIRA: When I asked one of their oldest,
most senior aerodynamicists, who couldn't speak any English at all,
what he thought would be the shape and location of an ice secretion
that could cause the behaviour that we saw
on the flight recorder for the Roselawn airplane...
..he drew up the aerofoil section
and a little shape just behind the de-ice boots
and said this was it
and the translation was that this is what will cause this problem.
Investigator Charley Pereira is beginning to understand
how ice can affect the wings of the French-built plane.
If the ice built up behind the boot,
the crew would have no way to clear it.
Still got ice.
And even a small amount of ice
can have a devastating effect on an airplane.
Ice can disrupt the smooth movement of air over the wing.
But how could so much ice build up behind the boot?
Investigators contact Dr Marcia Politovich for assistance.
Based on the weather analysis, it looked to us
like the kind of icing the plane encountered
was from supercooled large drops.
Now, large is relative - what we're talking about 'large' here
is about the size of a human hair.
Supercooled large droplets
are about 100 times smaller than a raindrop.
They form inside storm clouds when the temperature is near freezing.
But the drops don't freeze
until they come into contact with something solid,
like the wing of an airplane.
Conditions that day were ideal for the formation
of these tiny freezing droplets.
We had all the clues that we needed -
a warm cloud top, -8 to -12 degrees C,
we had drizzle formation near the top.
That was probably encouraged by some windshear over the cloud top.
And very little ice in the cloud, from what we could tell.
On every lap of its holding pattern,
Flight 4184 flew through layers of cloud
that hid a small but lethal element.
They just put that poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Investigators learn that Supercooled Large Droplets
have a distinctive way of accumulating on an aircraft wing.
Ordinary ice accumulates on the leading edge of the wing
where de-icing boots can get rid of it easily.
But SLD act differently.
These supercooled drops hit the wing
and slide back over it before freezing.
This forms a ridge behind the boots, out of reach of the de-icing system.
So if 4184 was flying in that type of environment,
rather than the water droplet
freezing on the protected surface of the de-ice boot,
it actually ran behind the de-ice boot
and froze on the metal surface.
For the pilots, when they looked out their side window,
they would see the outer portion of the wing.
They definitely could not see the top of the wing
where this ice ridge was starting to form.
For Greg Feith, the investigation is coming to a head.
His investigators think they know why Flight 4184 crashed,
but they can't prove it.
To make matters worse,
the plane's manufacturer suggests that the Roselawn crash
wasn't caused by an ice build-up,
but by poor piloting.
The NTSB thought it was an aircraft problem,
and the French aircraft manufacturer
thought it was a pilot problem and not their particular product.
Feith wants to know if there had been problems with ice
on ATR-built planes in the past.
He finds troubling similarities
between some incidents dating back decades.
Using data from flight data recorders,
investigators look at aileron movements from Flight 4184
and compare them to the other incidents.
They discover that on all those flights,
the aileron deflected in exactly the same way.
There's no input at all from the pilots.
We knew that all of these ailerons were being commanded to move -
not by the pilot
but in fact the disrupted airflow created by the icing event
that the airplane had encountered.
The physics of ice build-up
explains why the control column on Flight 4184 snapped to the right.
Air turbulence on the wing was so powerful
that it lifted the aileron,
which caused the plane to roll.
Since the aileron is attached to the control column by a cable,
it jerked the control yoke to the right.
The force of the turbulence pulling on the aileron was so great
that even two pilots trying to countersteer
weren't able to bring the aileron back down.
The forces were determined to be about 250 pounds,
so for the pilot it would have been trying to roll
against 250 pounds of aerodynamic force.
Worse, the ATR's control yoke doesn't have power steering,
so those forces are transmitted directly to the pilots.
The pilots could not fight back
against the air pulling on their aileron.
Now the real analysis began
because we had to understand what was going on
in-flight with the airplane.
We had good flight data recorder information.
It only told us what happened - didn't tell us why it happened.
We had to try and model this icing event some way.
Investigators first turn to NASA for help.
Together, they launch a daring experiment.
They use a US Air Force tanker plane
to create a cloud of supercooled water droplets.
An ATR 72 flies behind the tanker.
Yellow dye in the water shows investigators
how the droplets cover the plane.
The test should solve the final mystery.
How had ice caused Flight 4184 to go so badly out of control?
One of the primary purposes
of flying the ATR 72 in behind the tanker
was to understand how the ice accumulated on the airplane,
but more importantly,
the effect of that ice in varying configurations of the airplane
on the flight control surfaces - that is, the ailerons.
Investigators make a startling discovery.
A seemingly harmless action meant to increase comfort on the plane
may have led to disaster.
- Can I get you boys anything? - I'm good.
While American Eagle Flight 4184 was holding,
Captain Orlando Aguiar notices that the nose is tipped quite high.
There's a real lot of deck angle in these turns.
Yeah.
Captain Aguiar knows that the plane's high nose angle
was producing an uncomfortable tilt in the passenger cabin.
- You want flaps 15? - Bring the nose down.
Sure.
Extending the flaps would have the effect of lowering the plane's nose,
making the ride more comfortable.
When investigators duplicated this manoeuvre,
they found that it had a dramatic effect
on where the ice ridge formed on the plane's wing.
The flaps made the icing problem even worse.
By exposing more of the upper surface of the wing
to the oncoming water droplets...
And that's one of the reasons why we got the ridge of ice where we got it
was because of the flaps 15 configuration.
That's much nicer now. Flaps 15.
Yeah.
The ice build-up has no effect on the flight
until First Officer Gagliano begins his descent to 8,000 feet.
(BEEPING)
I knew we'd do that.
The descent increases the plane's airspeed.
This triggers a warning from the flight computer
telling the crew they're flying too fast
with the flaps extended.
I was trying to keep it at 180.
Gagliano now retracts the flaps.
But the routine gesture
has a dramatic effect on the plane's aerodynamics.
When they retracted the flaps
as they started their descent down to 8,000 feet,
the airplane pitched back up into a very nose-high attitude.
Airflow over the ice-laden wing was disrupted
when the nose lifted back up.
That created a turbulence that pulled up the ailerons,
sending the plane into a roll.
The plane stalled and tumbled from the sky.
- (RUMBLING) - Damn! (GROANS)
Had this crew had about 2,000-3,000 more feet of altitude,
there's a high probability
that they would have been able to salvage or recover the airplane
before it struck the ground.
The agency that regulates US aviation takes drastic action.
We are going to issue an airworthiness directive
this afternoon
that will preclude the operation of these aircraft
into known icing conditions.
The FAA takes swift action,
banning all models of the aircraft from flying in icy conditions.
This throws regional airlines like American Eagle into chaos.
Public concern over the safety of ATR airplanes
grows in the aftermath of the Roselawn crash.
The most controversial charge -
that the FAA had relied on the French authorities
to test and certify the aircraft,
then rubber-stamped the results.
Therefore the ATR 72 was never really tested by the FAA
in any way, shape and form,
as though it was manufactured here.
The plane's French builder proposes to fix the problem
by making the de-icing boots wider,
so they cover a larger part of the wing.
The company also rewrites operating procedures,
forbidding pilots from using the flaps
or flying on autopilot in icing conditions.
In response the FAA issues an amendment to their earlier directive
loosening operating restrictions on the ATRs.
Most airlines decide not to take any chances.
They move their ATRs to the south
where a warmer climate would reduce the risk of ice.
The crash at Roselawn set off a flurry of new research
into aircraft icing and the conditions that produce it.
POLITOVICH: There's a lot of weather data out there -
satellites, radars, surface ops -
and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger,
the collection of data.
New techniques in forecasting
are being developed to show pilots where icing is likely to occur
and help them avoid it.
The problem that exists
is that there is no technology available today
to the pilots or anyone on the ground
to accurately forecast or predict
where these situations of bad ice are going to occur.
Once these airplanes have been exposed to the bad ice,
it's too late because these are no longer airline pilots,
they're test pilots
and that airplane can fall out from under them and their passengers
without any warning and in the blink of an eye.