Transair Flight 810

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Transair Flight 810
Forward Fuselage Transair 810.png
Forward fuselage of the 737 found on the seabed a week later
Accident
DateJuly 2, 2021 (2021-07-02)
SummaryDitched after engines failed; under investigation
SiteMāmala Bay, Oahu
21°16′30″N 158°01′34″W / 21.275°N 158.026°W / 21.275; -158.026Coordinates: 21°16′30″N 158°01′34″W / 21.275°N 158.026°W / 21.275; -158.026
Aircraft
Aircraft typeBoeing 737-275C[Note 1]
OperatorRhoades Aviation, Inc.
Call signRHOADES EXPRESS 810
RegistrationN810TA
Flight originDaniel K. Inouye International Airport
DestinationKahului Airport
Occupants2
Fatalities0
Injuries2
Survivors2

Transair Flight 810, a Boeing 737-200 converted freighter aircraft on a short cargo flight en route from Honolulu International Airport to Kahului Airport on the neighboring Hawaiian island of Maui, experienced mechanical difficulties and crashed shortly after takeoff in the early morning of July 2, 2021.

The twin-engined plane was owned and operated by Rhoades Aviation, Inc., and had a crew of two. Both Pratt & Whitney JT8D turbofans faltered shortly after takeoff. Unable to maintain altitude, the pilots ditched off the coast of Oahu about 11 minutes into the flight.

The pair were rescued about an hour after the crash in a coordinated inter-agency response involving multiple aircraft and boats. Both were hospitalized for serious injuries and later released. The wreckage was located the following week at depths up to 420 feet (130 m) 2 miles (3 km) off Ewa Beach.

The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board immediately began investigating. Transair voluntarily withdrew its four remaining 737s from service for a week-long internal review. Transair resumed flying their one operational 737-200 a week later, but had to cease 737 operations a week after that due to deficiencies identified by the FAA prior to the ditching.

Flight[]

On July 2, 2021, at 1:33 a.m. HST, the aircraft began its take-off from Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) just west of Honolulu on the southern coast of Oahu.[1] At around 1:42 a.m., after air traffic control had cleared the flight to climb to 13,000 feet, the pilots informed Honolulu tower that the aircraft had "lost an engine."[2] Publicly available flight data show the aircraft had only climbed to around 2,100 feet (640 meters).[3]

The tower controller offered an immediate return for landing, but the crew instead requested "delay vectors" to "run a checklist".[2] They continued on a southwest heading, away from the airport.[4] At around 1:46 a.m., the crew reported that the second engine had overheated, and they could not maintain altitude.

After turning back toward Honolulu, the aircraft continued to lose altitude, so the controller issued a low-altitude alert and asked if they wanted to go to the closer Kalaeloa Airport instead. "We'd like the closest airport runway, please" was the last transmission recorded from the aircraft.[2] The plane went down on the water of Māmala Bay about 2 miles (3 km) short of Kalaeloa Airport.[1][5]

Emergency response[]

A United States Coast Guard helicopter rescued one pilot and an Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting (ARFF) boat rescued the other.[6] They were the only two people aboard. Both were brought to The Queen's Medical Center about 20 miles (32 km) away.[7] The 58-year-old survivor was hospitalized in critical condition; the 50-year-old survivor had a head injury and multiple lacerations and was hospitalized in serious condition.[8] Both men were released from the hospital within a few days.[9]

Rescue coordination[]

U.S. Coast Guard Joint Rescue Coordination Center Honolulu watchstanders received a report from Honolulu Air Traffic Control of a downed Boeing 737 offshore. In response, the Coast Guard issued a notice to mariners, launched a Eurocopter MH-65 Dolphin helicopter and HC-130 Hercules airplane from Coast Guard Air Station Barbers Point (co-located at the Kalaeloa Airport), sent out a 45-foot Response Boat – Medium crew, and diverted the cutter Joseph Gerczak.[7] In addition to the Coast Guard, multiple other agencies deployed, including Emergency Medical Services.[10] The Hawaii Department of Transportation’s ARFF boat based at the Honolulu International Airport also responded and took approximately 30 to 40 minutes to get to the scene after navigating through a mile-wide debris field.[11][12] A Coast Guard press release quoted a watchstander saying, "Our crews often train closely with our counterparts ... That training paid off and we were able to quickly deploy response assets to the scene and recover the two people aboard the aircraft."[7]

Coast Guard night vision video showing rescue of two pilots. Thumbnail shows rescue swimmer being hoisted aboard helicopter

On scene[]

Around 2:30 a.m., the Coast Guard helicopter located a fuel slick and wreckage.[13] The helicopter crew radioed to the same tower controller who last spoke to Flight 810 about 45 minutes earlier, "We do have an aircraft in the water. We're currently overhead [the] debris field", then called a few minutes later to report, "We have zero, two souls in sight in the water." The controller responded: "Okay, so you have both guys, both souls in sight?" to which they replied, "Both souls in sight, yes, sir."[14]

When the Coast Guard helicopter arrived on the scene, only about 2 miles (3 km) from their air station,[1][5] one survivor was on the vertical tail of the aircraft (the only part of the aircraft that could still be seen floating above the waves) while a second one was in the water floating on a bed of cargo soaked in jet fuel.[15][16] Both pilots had escaped through the cockpit windows.[17] The helicopter crew planned to rescue the survivor already in the water first but changed that plan when the tail section rapidly sank, leaving the other survivor struggling to swim. The aircrew lowered a rescue swimmer, who put the survivor in the rescue strop, and they were both lifted on board the helicopter.[18] That survivor was reported to be at the point of exhaustion and not fully responsive when he was assessed on board the helicopter.[19]

The helicopter then brought the rescue swimmer to assist the other survivor.[20][16] He was lifted on board the ARFF rescue boat, and later transferred to an ambulance on shore when the boat returned to the airport in Honolulu.[11][6] The survivor recovered first was flown directly to the hospital once the helicopter crew recovered its rescue swimmer.[21]

At the time of the rescue, there were winds of 17 miles per hour (27 km/h) and seas up to 5 feet (1.5 m).[7]

Aircraft[]

N810TA in May 2019, after its full freighter conversion

The aircraft involved was a 45-year-old first-generation Boeing 737-200. From 1968 to 1988, Boeing built 1,095 of the 737-200 type,[22] but by 2021, fewer than 60 were still flying worldwide.[14] Scheduled passenger service using 737-200s largely ended in 2008 with the closure of Aloha Airlines (also based in Honolulu) but a few remained in passenger service through 2020.[23]

C-GDPW in August 1998 in freight service in "combi" configuration[Note 2]

This 737-275C Adv.[Note 1] combi aircraft was built for Pacific Western Airlines, delivered on October 10, 1975, and originally registered in Canada as C-GDPW.[24][25] The aircraft was eventually taken out of passenger service, and later converted to a full freighter. In 1999 the converted airframe was re-registered to Transmile as 9M-PML in Malaysia until it was then re-registered by Transair in the U.S. as N810TA in 2014.[26] It was one of five Boeing 737s in Rhoades Aviation Inc's Transair fleet.[13]

Engines[]

A JT8D engine inlet fan case on the seabed a week after the ditching

First-generation 737s were powered by two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-9A[27] engines, originally designed for the Boeing 727 around 1960. Pratt & Whitney produced more than 14,000 of these engines before regular production ended in 1985. The company continued actively supplying parts and overhauling engines through 2021 when roughly 2,000 were still in use.[3][28][29] Mainline airline use of the JT8D continued until 2020 when Delta Airlines retired their MD-88 fleet early due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[30]

The FAA's Service Difficulty Reports database shows the aircraft involved, N810TA, experienced #1 (left) engine failure on takeoff twice in recent years, but with different engines each time. In a 2018 failure, the engine had accumulated 23,657 hours total time and 35,753 total cycles, while in a 2019 failure the engine had 71,706 total hours and 67,194 total cycles.[31]

Investigation[]

A bed of cargo floating in the debris field the following day

The following day, USCGC Joseph Gerczak completed collection of a small amount of incidental flotsam from the debris field to aid in the investigation.[32] The NTSB examined the retrieved items, described as mostly general cargo.[15]

In an initial statement, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said, "The pilots had reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the aircraft in the water ... The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board will investigate."[1][33] The FAA would not comment on its current investigation, but a local investigative reporter for KHON-TV found more than a dozen FAA enforcement actions against Rhoades Aviation and Trans Executive Airlines of Hawaii (d.b.a Transair), with fines that totaled over $200,000 over 25 years.[34] A company representative declined to comment because they are a party to the ongoing NTSB investigation, but a former FAA Chief Counsel published critical commentary on the reporting, cautioning against drawing premature conclusions from potentially unrelated historical enforcement actions.[35]

"Transair has voluntarily chosen not to operate our Boeing 737 cargo aircraft temporarily while we assess the situation and continue to cooperate with federal authorities in their investigation", a Transair spokesman said in a statement the following day.[15] Transair has a contract to carry mail between the Hawaiian Islands, but the United States Postal Service said no mail was aboard this flight. They had made alternate arrangements after Transair grounded its 737s.[34] Transair resumed 737-200 operations a week later.[36] But in less than a week, Rhoades Aviation lost its FAA inspection authorization at midnight on July 15, after failing to ask for reconsideration of a June 13 notice of deficiencies identified during an ongoing FAA investigation that began in 2020. This effectively grounded Rhoades's fleet of 737-200s, which only included one remaining operational aircraft at the time. The FAA said the grounding was not a direct result of the ditching.[37][38][31][39]

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) originally announced it was sending seven investigators immediately after the ditching, but updated that to say they were deploying a relatively large ten-investigator team to Oahu.[1] Two investigators arrived later that day and began on-scene coordination,[40] and the rest arrived by the next day. Team specialties included air traffic control, systems, maintenance records, human performance, operations, powerplants, and wreckage recovery.[41]

The NTSB also announced that the manufacturers of the airframe and the engines, Boeing and Pratt and Whitney respectively, would be among the parties to the investigation.[42] The NTSB stated, "In general terms, NTSB investigators develop factual information in three areas: the people involved in an accident, the equipment involved in the accident and the environment in which the accident occurred."[42]

Fuselage center section and wings on the seabed a week after the incident
The same section being recovered almost 4 months later

NTSB met with the parties to the investigation the following day, and said it would use side-scan sonar to locate and evaluate the wreckage prior to attempting to recover the "black box" flight recorders.[43] The wreckage was located the following week at depths between 360–420 ft (110–130 m)—below the depth where human divers could safely recover the flight recorders per the NTSB.[44]

The NTSB also sampled fuel from another aircraft and found no anomalies. By the end of the following week, the on-site "go-team" had completed collection of the perishable evidence, including interviews of more than a dozen key personnel, and returned home. But the flight recorders remained with the wreckage at the bottom of the sea.[45]

Photos from a remotely-controlled SEAMOR Marine Chinook underwater vehicle showed that the fuselage broke ahead of the wing, with the nose section separated from the center section, but the inboard sections of both wings were still attached to the fuselage wing carry-through.[46]

Recovery[]

The NTSB coordinated with the insurance company for Transair to begin an underwater recovery effort.[47] Both engines, both fuselage sections, and cargo, are now expected to be recovered, in an operation expected to begin on or about October 9, and last 10–14 days.[48][49] A research vessel, RV Bold Horizon (MMSI number: 303273000),[1] with a 7,000 lb. remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) will be used to raise the engines and rig each fuselage section for hoisting to the surface by a derrick barge Salta Verde (MMSI number: 367507960) equipped with a crane.[50] The recovery is somewhat unusual in that the aircraft did not break up into small pieces.[51] On November 2, the NTSB recovered both flight recorders as well as the aircraft's fuselage and engines.[52][53]

Video of the recovery operation by the NTSB.

See also[]

Notes[]

  1. ^ a b The 2 in the suffix denotes that it was a -200 series variant of the 737; 75 is the Boeing customer code for Pacific Western Airlines. The C in the model code designates that this aircraft was originally built as a 737-200 Combi, a specialized model of the aircraft that was designed to carry both passengers and freight on the main deck of the aircraft, separated by a movable bulkhead. Adv stands for Advanced, meaning it was a later variant with improved capacity and range over the original -200.
  2. ^ Note the gravel deflector on the nose gear from the Boeing "Unpaved Strip Kit" (gravel kit), which were sometimes fitted to 737-200's in Canada.

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d e Wallace, Gregory; Murphy, Paul P.; Andone, Dakin (July 2, 2021). "A Boeing 737 cargo plane makes emergency landing in the water near Honolulu". CNN. Retrieved July 2, 2021. The plane went down approximately two nautical miles south of Kalaeloa, Petty Officer 3rd Class Matthew West of the US Coast Guard District 14 Hawaii Pacific told CNN.
  2. ^ a b c Kaminski-Morrow, David (July 3, 2021). "Transair 737-200 crash crew believed both engines were failing". Flight Global. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
  3. ^ a b Levin, Alan; Philip, Siddharth Vikram; Johnsson, Julie; Beene, Ryan (July 2, 2021). "'Let the Coast Guard Know': Cargo Jet Ditches, Triggering Rescue". Bloomberg. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
  4. ^ "Audio of radio traffic between air traffic controller in Honolulu tower and Transair Flight 810". LiveATC.net. July 2, 2021. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  5. ^ a b "Boeing 737 cargo plane crashes off West Oahu with 2 on board". Hawaii News Now. July 2, 2021. Archived from the original on July 2, 2021. Retrieved July 5, 2021. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating after a cargo plane crashed in waters off West Oahu with two people on board. It happened around 1:45 a.m., about two miles off Kalaeloa Airport, according to the state Department of Transportation.
  6. ^ a b Parkhomchuk, Mariya (July 2, 2021). "Pilots in critical, serious conditions after plane goes down near West Oahu". KHON-TV. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
  7. ^ a b c d "Video available: Coast Guard, partners rescue 2 people from downed aircraft off Oahu". U.S. Coast Guard. July 2, 2021. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
  8. ^ Shapiro, Emily; Stone, Alex (July 2, 2021). "2 pilots alive after plane crashes few miles off coast of Hawaii". ABC News. Retrieved July 2, 2021.
  9. ^ "NTSB to survey debris field of cargo plane crash off Kalaeloa". Hawaii News Now. July 5, 2021. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
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  11. ^ a b Bernardo, Rosemarie (July 2, 2021). "Cargo plane crashes off Oahu; 2 injured pilots rescued". Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Retrieved July 7, 2021.
  12. ^ Hawaii DOT [@@DOTHawaii] (July 2, 2021). "Mahalo to Aircraft Rescue Firefighters Terrence Kashima, Raymond Vegas Jr., and Steward Lee (R to L) for their water rescue in response to the downed aircraft off Kalaeloa early this morning. We're glad you're always ready! #ARFF (MT Steward Lee should be Stuart Lee. Our apologies.)" (Tweet) – via Twitter.1411020552903434240
  13. ^ a b Shepardson, David; Ajmera, Ankit (July 2, 2021). "Boeing 737 cargo plane makes emergency water landing off Hawaii". Reuters. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
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  18. ^ Levin, Alan; Johnsson, Julie; Beene, Ryan (July 2, 2021). "'They Went Down': How Boeing 737 Pilots Survived Hawaii Ditching". Bloomberg. Retrieved July 5, 2021. The rescuers initially focused on the pilot clinging to the packages, said (Lieutenant Gleb) Borovok and Lieutenant Alex Mead, who flew the chopper. But then the tail of the aircraft started to sink, thrusting the man who had been perched there into the water. The helicopter deployed a swimmer and hoisted the Transair pilot aboard.
  19. ^ "WATCH: Coast Guard video shows dramatic rescue of pilots after cargo plane crash". Hawaii News Now. July 2, 2021. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
  20. ^ United States Coast Guard (July 2, 2021). "Coast Guard, partners rescue 2 people from downed aircraft off Oahu". Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
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  23. ^ "9 Oldest Commercial Passenger Planes in Service". Aero Corner. December 11, 2020. Retrieved July 8, 2021. 4. Boeing 737-200 of Air Inuit – 1979; 3. Boeing 737-200 of Venezolana – 1978; 2. Boeing 747-200 of Caspian Airlines – 1978; 1. Boeing 737-200 (G-GNLK) of Nolinor Aviation – 1974.
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  26. ^ "N810TA Rhoades Aviation Inc Boeing 737-275C, MSN 21116". OneSpotter.com | Plane Spotting, Photography, Aircraft Database. Retrieved July 4, 2021.
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  29. ^ "JT8D". Pratt and Whitney. Retrieved July 7, 2021. The JT8D engine has proven itself to be a highly durable and reliable engine, having completed more than 673 million dependable flying hours since entering service. Once deemed the workhorse of the industry, more than 14,750 JT8D engines have flown. Today, there are 2,400 engines still in use.
  30. ^ McMurtry, Ian (June 3, 2020). "The JT8D Engine Roars into History Books as Delta Retires McDonnell Douglas Fleet". AirlineGeeks.com. Retrieved July 8, 2021.
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  32. ^ @USCGHawaiiPac (July 3, 2021). "Update: The @USCG is assisting the @NTSB during their investigation into the incident involving a downed cargo plane off Oahu Saturday. The Coast Guard continues to work with our partners during the salvage operation and environmental response" (Tweet). Retrieved July 11, 2021 – via Twitter.
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  36. ^ "T4809 (RDS809) Transair Flight Tracking and History 09-Jul-2021 (PHNL-OGG / PHOG)". FlightAware. Retrieved July 10, 2021. Friday 09-Jul-2021 06:19AM HST Daniel K Inouye Intl - HNL 06:42AM HST Kahului - OGG B732 0h 23m
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  38. ^ Levin, Alan (July 16, 2021). "Cargo Airline Was Being Investigated Before Crash off Hawaii". Bloomberg News. Retrieved July 18, 2021.
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  41. ^ @ntsb_newsroom (July 2, 2021). "Team specialties include air traffic control, systems, maintenance records, human performance, operations, powerplants & structures/wreckage recovery" (Tweet). Retrieved July 4, 2021 – via Twitter.
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Public Domain This article incorporates public domain material from the United States Government document: "Coast Guard, partners rescue 2 people from downed aircraft off Oahu, United States Coast Guard".

Public Domain This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Transportation Safety Board.

External links[]

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