(The headline as published has been corrected in this text.)
They heard the boom all over Niles.
A sharp crack from American Airlines Flight 1374 broke the everyday drone of jet traffic over the near north suburb shortly after 2 p.m. Thursday. The plane returned safely to O’Hare minutes after takeoff. No one was injured. But the shards of metal that rained down on neighborhoods, play yards and a town fountain reminded residents of the potential dangers in the sky.
As at least one large bird apparently was sucked into the left engine of the twin-engine McDonnell Douglas Super 80 bound for Philadelphia with 107 passengers and a crew of five on board, the resulting roar drove Jeanne O’Grady’s cat under the couch. Later, as O’Grady, 43, walked near her home near Howard Street and Harlem Avenue, she found a 4-inch piece of jagged metal thought to have fallen from the plane.
“If that had hit a kid in the head, that would have been really bad,” she said. “Of course you can’t blame anyone, because it was a bird. But it worries me that they want to make the airport bigger. Thank God nothing has happened before.”
In a harrowing few moments, police scanners blared calls for all available ambulances to report to O’Hare as witnesses on the ground saw flames coming from the plane. On board, passengers heard one or two loud booms and felt the left side and tail shake and dip. Some concluded death was imminent.
Joe Richardson, 44, who lives in a Philadelphia suburb, looked out the window and saw that “the whole left side” was on fire. He said he was “absolutely” convinced the plane was going to crash.
The MD-80, however, is designed to fly safely with one engine. Pilots quickly turned the plane around as flight controllers at O’Hare cleared runways for a successful emergency landing.
“The pilots thought they saw about 20 geese, and I think one got cooked, at least,” said American spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan. “The pilots did their job. They did what they were trained to do.”
The plane, piloted by a captain and first officer with more than 8,000 combined hours of flight experience, departed O’Hare on a northeast heading shortly after 2 p.m. The plan was to climb to 24,000 feet by the time it was well over Lake Michigan, 40 miles from the airport.
But 10 miles from the airport, at about 3,000 feet with the plane still in a critical phase of flight, the pilots saw the flock of geese, then heard a cockpit alarm as the left engine burst into flames. The pilots deployed an external fire extinguisher, shut down the charred engine and immediately banked back to the southeast. The O’Hare tower momentarily stopped all arrivals and departures, allowing Flight 1374 clear access back to the ground, where it safely came to rest at 2:19 p.m., according to officials at the airline and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Back on the ground, passenger Jeff Mueller, 38, a former Delta Airlines mechanic from Chicago, said both wings of the plane were splattered with bird blood.
“The outside of the engine was just like charcoal,” Mueller said. “You come down the stairs and look back, and you think you’re very lucky.”
None of the passengers or five crew members required medical treatment, Fagan said. They were whisked to a new flight that left O’Hare at 4:44 p.m. and arrived in Philadelphia shortly after 7 p.m.
The kind of bird strike suspected to have caused Thursday’s spectacle is an everyday occurrence in commercial aviation. But rarely do the mid-air collisions between fowl and jets cause such a scare.
“It’s a dangerous thing, but not unusual, and not excessively dangerous,” said Fred Culick, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering and jet propulsion at the California Institute of Technology.
The FAA’s National Wildlife Strike Database shows planes made contact with animals, including birds, 2,237 times this year so far. It happened 6,819 times last year and 61,907 times since 1990.
Canada geese have been the victims of 89 such collisions with airplanes in Illinois in the past 14 years, according to the FAA.
But in more than 80 percent of bird-plane collisions there is no noticeable effect. Only 8 percent of such mishaps result in engine shutdowns or precautionary landings.
In 1995, an Air Force AWACS radar plane crashed in Alaska, killing 24 crewmen, after geese were sucked into one of the plane’s engines.
Six people in the United States died of injuries attributable to collisions between birds and non-military aircraft in the 1990s, according to federal data.
It is nevertheless dramatic when the bird is a big one, and the place it hits is the center of an airplane engine.
Small birds go right through, Culick said. Larger birds first smack into a rapidly whirring metal fan that likely cuts them apart before sending pieces through the engine’s compressor, combustion chamber and turbine, tearing metal along the way and spraying burning fuel into the air.
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“One would guess seeing flames that something happened in the inner core,” Culick said of Thursday’s incident. “One would think a piece of the bird, a fairly big piece, went through the combustor and turbine.”
By mid-afternoon Thursday, Niles residents had turned wreckage hunting into an impromptu pastime. Niles police received more than 100 calls reporting the incident or debris, said Cmdr. John Fryksdale (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
Chunks of metal fell into the Niles Veterans Memorial Waterfall at Touhy and Milwaukee Avenues. Dozens of bystanders gathered at Pioneer Park at Touhy and Harlem as police picked up more scraps that fell on baseball fields, in batting cages and on a miniature golf course.
A caretaker at St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery on Milwaukee Avenue called Niles police after two pieces of the airplane fell there, said Niles police Sgt. Jim Elenz.
“He said he actually saw the stuff falling from the sky, and he pointed out the pieces,” Elenz said. “They were about the size of a half sheet of paper. They were flexible, kind of looked like fiberglass.”
On the roof of the Niles Shopping and Medical Center, seven workers heard a loud noise and looked up to see the plane trailing flames and smoke behind it.
People at the busy intersection of Touhy and Milwaukee stopped and looked at the sky.
“First there was a pop and a roar,” said roofing contractor Greg Dobbs.
Another man on his crew, Ivaylo Toched, said he “heard something like thunder.”
Street traffic slowed and then stopped, said Toched. For a minute, maybe two, the workers on the roof watched the plane, which had apparently still been climbing out of takeoff, bend south toward Chicago, then limp back toward O’Hare. The flames went out once, reappeared, then went out again.
“What happened today is scary,” said Ron Smizera, 57, whose condo is less than 100 feet from where some of the debris fell in Pioneer Park. “This is rare. How often does stuff fall off a plane?”
Others reveled in the oddity and the happy fact that no one got hurt.
“We love it,” Niles resident Mary Sullivan said of the steady roar overhead. “Sometimes we just sit out and watch because we have a passion for planes.”
– – –
Plane lands after engine damage
An American Airlines flight to Philadelphia returned safely to O’Hare International Airport Thursday after one of the plane’s two engines apparently struck a bird. So far this year, about 80 airplane-bird strikes have been reported in Illinois.
Left engine was significantly damaged. The
plane can fly safely with one operating engine.
PLANES WITH MOST BIRD-ENGINE STRIKES
Reported strikes in the U.S. for commercial
aircraft with fuselage-mounted engines 1990-99
McDonnell Douglas MD-80, 145, 7.36
McDonnell Douglas DC-9, 122, 7.83
Boeing-727, 106, 5.08
Fokker 100, 29, 8.14
Canadair RJ, 21, 79.73
AREA WITH MOST BIRD STRIKES
Reported strikes in the U.S., 1990-99
California, 2516
Florida, 2,367
Illinois, 1,482
Kentucky, 723
Washington, D.C., 705
MCDONNELL DOUGLAS MD-80
Passenger capacity: 172
Engines: 2
Max takeoff weight:
140,000 pounds
Wingspan: 107 feet, 10 inches
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Length: 147 feet, 10 inches
Height: 29 feet, 8 inches
STRIKE’S EFFECT ON FLIGHT
Reported wildlife strikes in the U.S.,
1990-99
None, 15,360
Aborted take off, 653
Precautionary landing, 1,344
Engines shut down, 156
Other*, 461
*Other includes reduced speed because of
shattered windshield, emergency landing
at destination airport or crash landing
Sources: Federal Aviation Administration, National Wildlife Strike Database Serial Report 6,
American Airlines,”Modern Commercial Aircraft” baiduhai
– See microfilm for complete graphic.