American Airlines Flight 1420 Research Paper

On June 1st, 1999, the American Airlines Flight 1420 was on its way to the Little Rock National Airport. The American Airlines Flight 1420’s pilot was considered a very experienced pilot with more than 10,000 total flight hours. The airplane that was used during the flight is a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-82 (MD-82) (NTSB, 2001). The airplane was supposed to land just 10 minutes before midnight. The airplane touched the ground according to the schedule, however the airplane failed to stop before the end of the runway. The flight 1420 faced a very bad storm on that night within just above the minimum visibility limitation requirement. The DC-9 overran the end of runway 4R and collided with the structure supporting the runway 22L approach lighting system killing the captain and 10 passengers (NTSB,

National Transportation Safety Board right away came to the crash scene and conducted investigation on the crews and eyewitnesses. The NTSB found that the aircraft spoiler was not opened up during the landing, reducing the airplane braking power significantly. The NTSB found no preexisting condition on the airplane or the crews that could affect the American Airlines Flight 1420 performance. The crews were properly certificated and qualified with no evidence indicating any intoxication or medication that would affect their performance (NTSB, 2001). However, the NTSB found that the crews were very close into over timing their duty hour’s limitation. The NTSB then declared human issue was indeed a big major issue that caused the flight 1420 went wrong on June 1st, 1999 (Wiegmann, 2001).
The NTSB then conducted an investigation using the Human Factor Analysis and Classification System. The investigation was split into finding the human factor issue within the flight 1420 starting from the organizational influences on that day, followed by unsafe supervisions, preexisting condition to the crews and also any unsafe acts that happened during the landing of the DC-9