On the evening of December 28, 1978, United Flight 173 was on approach to Portland, Oregon, a DC-8 from Denver with 181 passengers on board. The crew lowered the landing gear. There was a loud thump, a hard jolt, and the plane swung to the right. Of the three green lights that should have said “gear down and locked,” one stayed dark.
The captain did what a careful captain does. He told air traffic control he had a gear problem and asked to hold. For about an hour, the jet circled southeast of the airport at 5,000 feet while the crew worked through every step they had. The flight engineer checked the mechanical markers on top of the wings. They said the gear was down. The captain called the airline’s maintenance center in San Francisco. He had the flight attendants prepare the passengers for a possible crash landing, and told the company he was not going to hurry them.
All the while, the fuel was going. When the captain called San Francisco, he reported about 7,000 pounds left and planned to hold another 15 or 20 minutes. Later he asked the flight engineer to work out the numbers for about another fifteen minutes. The engineer answered: “Fifteen minutes is gonna really run us low on fuel here.” The first officer asked about the fuel more than once. Each time, the talk went back to the gear and the cabin.
Then, while the captain was going over the landing with the lead flight attendant, the first officer said he thought they had just lost engine number four. A moment later:
“We’re going to lose an engine, buddy.”
“Why?” the captain asked.
“We’re losing an engine.”
“Why?”
“Fuel.”
One by one, the engines flamed out. At about 6:15 p.m., Flight 173 came down in a wooded suburb about six nautical miles from the airport. Ten people died: eight passengers, the flight engineer and a flight attendant. There was no fire. Investigators found no usable fuel on board.
The gear had been down and locked the whole time. A part had failed, the gear had dropped hard, and the fall broke the small switch that turns on the light.
The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the captain’s preoccupation with the gear, and the failure of the other two crew members either to grasp how critical the fuel was or to get their concern across. It asked the FAA to teach captains “participative management” and to train everyone else in the cockpit to speak up. In 1981, United became the first airline to adopt what came to be called Crew Resource Management. In the US it has since become a requirement.
One of the lessons the FAA lists for this crash reads: “The risk associated with a flight crew’s preoccupation with an emergency can exceed the risk posed by the emergency itself.”