UPS Flight 1354 crashed at the Birmingham, Alabama, airport in August 2013 because the crew continued an unstabilized approach, the NTSB said on Tuesday. “The crew failed to monitor the altitude and inadvertently descended below the minimum descent altitude when the runway was not yet in sight,” the NTSB said in a statement. Factors contributing to the accident, the board said, were the flight crew’s failure to properly configure the on-board flight management computer, the first officer’s failure to make required call-outs, the captain’s decision to change the approach strategy without communicating his change to the first officer, and flight-crew fatigue.
The airplane, an Airbus A300-600, crashed in a field short of Runway 18 at 4:47 a.m. The captain and first officer, the only people aboard, were both killed, and the airplane was destroyed by the impact and a post-crash fire. The flight originated from Louisville, Kentucky. “An unstabilized approach is a less safe approach,” said NTSB Acting Chairman Christopher Hart. “When an approach is unstable, there is no shame in playing it safe by going around and trying again.” A synopsis of the NTSB report is available online. The full report will be available on the NTSB website in several weeks.
