Air Florida Flight 90 — Iced Wings, Anti-Ice Off, Down on the 14th Street Bridge

On 13 January 1982, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737-200 attempting to take off from Washington National Airport in a snowstorm, climbed only a few hundred feet before stalling, struck the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River, and fell into the freezing, ice-choked water. Of the 79 people aboard, 74 passengers and 5 crew, all but five were killed; four people on the bridge also died in the impact. The official toll was 78 dead — 74 aboard the aircraft and 4 on the ground — with five survivors pulled from the river. It was a takeoff accident in plain sight of the United States capital, and the National Transportation Safety Board’s reconstruction made it one of the most-studied crew-performance cases in aviation.

The 737, registration N62AF, had been deiced before pushback, but a long delay between deicing and departure left it accumulating fresh snow and ice on the wings as it waited in the falling snow for takeoff clearance. Critically, the crew did not switch on the engine anti-ice system. Without it, the engine pressure probes iced over and gave falsely high thrust readings; the engines were in fact producing substantially less power than the gauges indicated. On the takeoff roll the captain pressed on despite the first officer twice voicing concern that the readings looked wrong. Contaminated by ice and under-powered, the aircraft lifted off, struggled to climb, stalled, and came down on the bridge and into the river.

The NTSB determined the probable cause to be the flight crew’s failure to use engine anti-ice during ground operation and takeoff, their decision to take off with snow and ice on the wings, and the captain’s failure to reject the takeoff when the first officer drew attention to the anomalous engine readings. Contributing factors included the prolonged ground delay after deicing, the known tendency of the 737 to pitch up when its leading edges are contaminated, and the crew’s limited experience operating jet transports in winter conditions.

The crash drove lasting changes in cold-weather operating procedures, in deicing and holdover practice, and in the training of crews for winter takeoffs. It also entered the public record for the conduct of the rescue, including a passenger who repeatedly passed a helicopter lifeline to others before slipping beneath the ice, and the bystanders and aircrews who pulled survivors from the river.