Panel Faults FAA In Comair Crash

Investigators say the federal agency responsible for safe air travel may be partly responsible for a commuter plane crash last year. CBS News Correspondent Bob Orr reports that pilots were frozen out of some crucial information.

While ice on the wings and pilot mistakes brought down Comair flight 3272 on Jan. 9, 1997, federal safety investigators concluded that inaction by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was the principal cause of the crash.

In issuing its report, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released an animation of the doomed flight. The twin-engine commuter plane with 29 people aboard was just minutes from landing in Detroit when it suddenly rolled and plunged in a fatal nosedive.

Investigators now believe a very thin layer of ice on the wings (called "sandpaper ice") caused the pilots to lose control. Investigators suspect the thin, but fatal, layer of ice accumulated in less than five minutes.

Bernard Loeb, who heads airline safety issues for the NTSB, says the accumulation was "very small amounts that may have even been imperceptible - certainly amounts that would not have alarmed the pilots."

The NTSB blasted the FAA for failing to establish safety procedures for operating in icing conditions. In one case, the plane's manufacturer urged that de-icing equipment be turned on at the first sign of ice. But Comair and the FAA did not make that change to the pilots' flight manuals.

"Not to pass that kind of information on to the people that are operating these airplanes in these conditions on an almost daily basis is unconscionable," says John Goglia, a NTSB member.

The NTSB now wants the FAA to order more training, improve de-icing equipment, and conduct new tests to see how turbo props perform in ice. It's an aggressive safety agenda aimed at the 1,500 commuter planes that carry more than 50 million Americans each year.