NTSB: Southwest nose landing at LaGuardia was captain's fault

The Southwest Airlines pilot who landed nose first and skidded thousands of feet to a halt at New York's LaGuardia Airport two years ago should have aborted the landing, federal accident investigators have determined.

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the accident July 22, 2013, on the captain's attempt to recover from a bad landing approach by taking control of the Boeing 737-700 from the co-pilot at just 27 feet off the ground, rather than simply circling the airport for another landing attempt.

The board also blamed the captain for failing to comply with Southwest's own standard operating procedures to abort a landing higher off the ground if the descent isn't lined up correctly with the runway.

"The flight crew's performance was indicative of poor crew resource management," the board said in a statement accompanying the decision Thursday.

The board said the incident raised safety concerns because 75% of the aviation accidents investigated featured cues that the pilots should have aborted their landings. Despite airline flight manuals urging pilots to circle the airport after an unstable approach, a study at an International Air Safety Summit in 2011 suggested that pilots continued landing in 97% of unstable approaches.

Southwest's plane landed hard enough that the nose-gear punched up into the plane's electronics bay and it skidded 2,175 feet to a halt, according to investigators.

Eight people suffered minor injuries on the flight; 141 passengers and crewmembers were uninjured.

Southwest fired the captain in October 2013. Documents that investigators released in October 2014 documented friction between the captain and first officer during the landing.

The 49-year-old captain had flown for Southwest more than a decade and she had 12,000 hours of flight time, including 2,600 as pilot in command on a 737, according to investigators.

Southwest had hired the first officer, 44, a year-and-a-half before the accident, after he spent 20 years in the Air Force, investigators said.

The first officer flew the plane from Nashville but said that the captain was giving instructions about the landing. The pilots avoided thunderstorms in the area, but they approached the airport with a tail wind the captain said reached more than 30 mph.

The pilots agreed to set the plane's wing flaps at 40 degrees, rather than the customary 30 degrees, to help slow the plane down, according to investigators. But the first officer told investigators he landed with 30-degree flaps about 98% of the time, and that the higher drag of 40 degrees meant the pilot had to be "on his game."

When the plane was about 500 feet off the ground, the captain noticed that the flaps were still at 30 degrees, so she set them to 40 degrees.

About 100 to 200 feet above ground, the plane was still above the intended glide slope and the captain exclaimed repeatedly "get down," according to investigators.

About 27 feet off the ground, 3 seconds from touch down, the captain took control of the plane by saying "I got it," and the first officer replied, "OK, you got it," according to investigators.

The plane's nose was pointed down 3 degrees and it hit descending at a rate of 960 feet per minute, according to investigators.

Southwest's flight operations manual says any landing should be aborted when the plane isn't in the proper configuration to land at least 1,000 feet in the air. But the flaps were changed at 500 feet and the captain noticed the plane was above the intended glide slope at 100 feet in the air, which investigators said were both opportunities to circle the airport for another try.

The board found that "the captain's decision to take control of the airplane at 27 feet above the ground did not allow her adequate time to correct the airplane's deteriorating energy state and prevent the nose landing gear from striking the runway."