Southern Airways Express Flight 246 landed on a Virginia parkway near Washington Dulles International Airport four minutes after takeoff yesterday. What caused the emergency landing?
What Prompted Emergency Landing Of Southern Airways Express Flight 246?
On Friday, January 20, 2024, Southern Airways Express Flight 246 took off from Washington Dulles (IAD) at 12:45 pm with scheduled commuter service to Lancaster, Pennsylvania (LNS). The flight was operated by Cessna 208B Grand Caravan. Minutes after takeoff, in snowy conditions and with the aircraft having only climbed to 850 feet, a mayday was declared and the flight promptly landed on a Loundon County parkway in Northern Virginia.
All five passengers, including a teenager, and two pilots were safe. The flight was under the command of 27-year-old Ahmed Awais.
Air Traffic Control audio of the incident is fascinating. Although much of it coming from the Southern Airways flight is unintelligible, it all happened very fast: the mayday, the landing, and the report of safety. Have a listen:
Probably the first (and hopefully the only) time that a Wendy’s and Aldi were used for coordinates!
Crews eventually cleared the aircraft before sunset:
Update: Loudoun County Parkway is in the process of being cleared. Crews are treating the road once the plane is towed away. Lanes will reopen to traffic shortly. https://t.co/pgp4ZVnkdb pic.twitter.com/tJQrImJzAe
— VDOT Northern VA (@VaDOTNOVA) January 19, 2024
The question on all of our minds is how did this happen? What went wrong onboard? Was it a mechanical issue? A weather issue? Thus far, neither investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board nor Southern Airways Express have explained what led to the emergency landing.
Interestingly, HuffPo did a piece last October about how Southern Airways Express sued 80 of its former pilots to recoup training costs after they quit in protest of perceived safety concerns. One former pilot, Nate Hilliard, was profiled in the story:
Hilliard says he saw pilots with only limited experience being pressured to fly in poor weather so that flights wouldn’t be held up. He saw managers discouraging pilots from flagging maintenance issues that could have taken aircraft out of commission for repairs. And he believes many pilots were afraid to raise their safety concerns because they could end up literally indebted to Southern.
The Florida-based airline has filed “roughly 80 lawsuits against pilots who left the company, accusing them of breach of contract and unjust enrichment” since last July (Hilliard was not sued).
Starting pay for a first officer is $12/hour.
[P]ilots were routinely pushed beyond their comfort zones, pressured to fly in icy conditions or while fatigued, and they feared they would jeopardize their pilot certificates, their lives or the lives of their passengers if they stayed.
With the weather poor at Washington Dulles during takeoff, it is not clear yet if there was any pressure to operate this flight against the will of the flight crew.
CONCLUSION
The good news is that there were no injuries on Southern Airways Express Flight 246 after it made an emergency landing near Washington Dulles Airport on Friday. The unknown, however, is critical. Why did this occur? Is there a culture of intimidation at Southern Airways Express? If the wether conditions were so poor at IAD, why did the flight to LNS take off in the first place?
image: Virginia State Police
Sheesh, this is a pile of nonsense.
You know why the plane made an emergency landing on the road? Because it had an engine failure. Duh.
Now what caused the engine failure? That’s the more useful question (hint: probably not because of ongoing labor disputes at the company operating it).
Believe me, no pilot is going to takeoff from Dulles, and then in a perfectly capable airplane make an attempted landing ON A ROAD FILLED WITH TRAFFIC just a few minutes later because they felt “pressured” to fly in bad weather. Nobody.
Yeah, $12/hour pilots are not ideal. But it’s what the public demands (cheap tickets). Want a pilot who isn’t moonlighting at Mickey Dee’s? Then be prepared to pay a bit more (for your ticket, not for your Big Mac).
My first thought was it could be a de-icing issue. I live directly north of IAD and Loudoun County, across the Potomac. Yesterday we had good deal of snow. Around 1-2pm the storm stopped and on weather radar it appeared to be moving away. This turned out to not be the case.
I am certainly grateful that there weren’t any injured and hopefully we will have answers soon.
The prop is feathered, and on a PT-6A engine on a Caravan it doesn’t auto-feather on failure. The pilots had to do so manually. That’s one of the first steps in the engine failure checklist. Feathering the prop yields the least drag to enable gliding further. So it would appear that the engine failure procedure was followed.
If it was a deicing issue… airplane would have stalled if due to ice on the wings and that certainly wouldn’t be a controlled landing with next to no damage on a road lined with trees on one side and tall powerlines on the other. A stall would mean going down pretty much straight ahead, and unlikely they’d have made it to the altitude they did and started their turn onto the departure course (the right turn, before presumably the issue occurred and they turned left toward the road). Southern also deices just like everybody else (I’ve deiced several of their planes myself actually).
I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in pilots who are finding reasons trying to get out of contracts that THEY SIGNED WILLINGLY. People try to break apartment leases claiming they shouldn’t get charged because the neighbors are problems, the dishwasher never works, etc etc etc. Same principle.
What caused it to make an emergency landing ? Easy : The USAF would say : it wouldn’t fly .