MSPeconomist

I see a nice loop before landing, probably to line up the runway approach, and some bounces in altitude during the last ten minutes.

MrMan

And I can't wait until CNN's top anchorman has a round table discussion whether a possible wormhole, as in the CNN speculation of possible Malaysian flight accident cause, could have possibly caused this incident. I wonder if the Delta passengers saw the Malaysian passengers!

MSPeconomist

This photo shows why they couldn't exit through the forward doors.

MSPeconomist

The press conference stated that fuel was leaking at a rate of one gallon per minute, which is minor (despite what CNN's reporters first said).

MikeShores

Perhaps the pilots saw the gate in the fence and decided that was their assigned gate?

All kidding aside, very glad no one was seriously injured. It will be interesting to see the components of the preliminary NTSB report.

gooselee

Thanks for the lookup! I just peeked back at the photos - if you look closely at the ones without the tailcone, it seems that there's a half-inflated slide crumpled up underneath the plane.

So it would seem that the aft door handle was pulled, tailcone jettisoned, but the slide didn't have room to properly inflate between the angled tail and ground.

NWAFA

I wonder why the chutes didn't deploy.

Down3Green

gooselee,

The 'Emergency Exit' on the tail of the MD88/90 does not even use the stairs. In fact, you can't even lower the stairs from inside the aircraft as the former controls have been removed (there is a secret way to do it from inside, but only pilots would know about it, the F/As certainly wouldn't).

With the aft door armed, simply opening the door causes the tail cone to drop off and a slide to deploy. To use the exit, there is actually a catwalk that is lowered and you never touch the stairs but go straight out the circular area shown in this photo:



I suspect today's event was a controlled evacuation, which is to say that the cockpit had time to evaluate the situation and the passengers remained under control. The two forward doors were unusable as they were actually out over water. It sounds like the Crash crew identified a fuel leak on the left side and alerted the crew making it unwise to use either the aft left or left overwing. The incline of the plane may have left doubts about the tail exit as the tail cone itself may not have seperated properly and blocked the exit. That left the right overwing as the only viable exits (there is no aft right door).

airplanegod

I wouldn't be surprised if Delta does indeed retire this bird and then use the parts to fix/replace other parts on the remaining MD88's, kind of like how they bought a SAS MD82 just for parts.

kerflumexed

If this thing lives to fly another day, I wonder what nickname it will have. FedEx had a collection of rebuilt airframes, not ok for pax but ok for boxes, and one was an SAS DC-10 that ended up in the drink at EWR after a landing overrun auto-throttle/crew screw up cluster. It was known as the Salty Dog.

This accident reminded me of USAir flight 5050, that ended up in the water at LaGarbage, but that was on takeoff. I always wondered about the wisdom of flying on a flight numbered 5050.

You want to go where?

It's a bus gate.

MSPeconomist

It asks me to register and log in.

MSPeconomist

Aviate, navigate, communicate.

MSPeconomist

They were 45 minutes late.

Ebes1099

Delta rebooked me on a 6:45am tomorrow through IND that gets into LGA at 2pm. Clearly that won't work for me, and when I called everything into NYC area was full or canceled.

I booked a Sun Country flight from MSP-JFK for 4:30 but I would like to keep my Delta return flight Sunday. Sounds like I can do that if I let them know I'll be missing the first leg (at least that's what one of the ticketing agents told me).

Am I still able to get the miles I would have flown for MSP-LGA (ORC or Trip in Vain??) And if I do that do I still get the credit for the portion of the unused leg?