Air Illinois Flight 710 was a scheduled passenger flight from Chicago to Carbondale, Illinois, United States. On the night of October 11, 1983, the Hawker Siddeley HS 748 operating the Air Illinois flight crashed near Pinckneyville, Illinois, due to the flightcrew's mismanagement of electrical generator and distribution problems, noting the captain's habit of violating safety regulations in order to arrive on time. All 10 passengers and crew were killed in the accident. The airline was grounded until it proved it could meet minimal FAA safety standards, returning to service in steps from December 1983 to March 1984; in April 1984, Air Illinois folded, declaring bankruptcy.
Accident sequence The flight flew from Chicago to Springfield, Illinois uneventfully, but when it touched down at Springfield Airport, the flight had been delayed by 45 minutes. At 20:20 local time, the aircraft took off from Springfield. Roughly 1.5 minutes after takeoff, the crew reported a "slight electrical problem" and would keep air traffic control "advised". The NTSB concluded that the first officer then mistakenly pushed the right generator (which was fully functioning) isolate button, instead of the left generator (the problem generator) isolate button, without bothering to check the gauges and warning lights to confirm which generator was the problem; this was attributed, and confirmed on the CVR by the first officer's statement to the captain, to the right generator on that aircraft having had a recent history of maintenance issues. Twelve minutes after takeoff, the first officer reported to the captain that the left generator was "totally dead" and that, while he had corrected his error of isolating the right generator, he now found that it was producing voltage but wouldn't stay online. Roughly 20 minutes after takeoff, the crew shut off excess lights in the cabin, but did not further reduce the electrical load on the aircraft's battery. Ultimately the battery was depleted, resulting in the failure of the aircraft's flight instruments, and communication and navigation radios. At 20:52, the captain decided to descend to 2,400 feet, from there the aircraft slowly descended into a hilly pasture area and banked right as the co-pilot used a flashlight to determine the location of the plane. The crew may have attempted a forced landing before the aircraft crashed, or a disoriented pilot mistook strip lighting at a mine for approach lights at Carbondale Airport. All ten on board perished.
The aircraft was heard by John Fisher and his wife Arilla circling over their property a couple of times. Arilla Fisher said that it had been raining pretty hard at the time of impact. She also said "The aircraft circled two times. It made a lot more noise the second time. I ran to the back porch. I saw one flash and heard a lot of noise. [John and I] could smell gas and fuel." The flash was reported to have been a brief flash fire from the spewing fuel and no explosion had taken place. The various victims were strewn across a quarter mile radius of the crash site. The largest recoverable section of the aircraft was the baggage compartment and the landing gear wheel section.
Investigation Accident investigators determined the probable cause to be:
The investigation revealed the captain, considered an "average pilot", was a "one-man operation" and did not welcome input from the co-pilot and was in a hurry to return to Carbondale after being on duty all day. The report said the captain had a habit of violating safety regulations in order to arrive on time, even disabling safety devices in order to overspeed the aircraft.
One of the three NTSB investigators, Patricia A. Goldman, filed a concurring statement of the captain's initial bad decision, but dissented in that the report placed too little blame on the fundamental decision-making error by the captainwhen the electrical problem presented just 90 seconds after takeoff from Springfieldto continue to Carbondale as the sole probable cause, with the other items being contributing factors:
Cockpit voice recording
Aftermath Initial findings during the NTSB investigation led the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the airline, ordering it to update operations to meet minimal safety standards. Most company employees were placed on furlough and after an extensive rewrite of the company's operations manual, the FAA granted an operating certificate for flight operations for just its jet airplanes, a pair of BAC One-Eleven aircraft, which returned to service in December 1983. The larger fleet of turboprop aircraft did not qualify for an operating certificate until March 1984, by which time the privately owned company had lost over million (equivalent to $million in ) and a tentative sale to commuter airline Air Midwest had fallen through. Air Illinois folded in April 1984 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In popular culture The events of Air Illinois Flight 710 were featured in the 2022 episode "Pitch Black", of the Canadian-made, internationally distributed documentary series Mayday.
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