Flight 173 Essay

Portland United Airlines Flight 173 Aviation has morphed into the safest way of traveling so far in the world. It is a simple way to get from one place to another with the straightest route and the convince of being the fastest form of transportation. Even though aviation is one of the most convenient and accommodating forms of transport, we as Americans seem to only focus on the negative aspects of aviation travel. Since the dawn of aviation itself, traveling by air has proven a challenge, and discomfort for much of the American population. Let us delve into one of these incidences, of which deals with the human error surrounding the crew of American Airline’s flight 173, whom lost their lives due to human and mechanical error.
United Airlines
After the captain realized that there was an electrical issue with the landing gear he radioed for atc for help. The problem is that the pilot repeatedly circled the airport and thought nothing of putting the plane on the ground safely. It is a hard decision to make figuring out weather to risk landing the plane and gambling if the landing gear was actually down or not. The pilots on the Douglas DC-8 were captain Malburn McBroom who was a world war 2 veteran and learned to fly after the war. The first officer was Roderick Beebe and the third man of the flight was Forrest Mendenhall. His job was to keep watch and care for the 4 engines of the DC-8 airplane. Captain McBroom was a very experienced pilot for United Airlines and logged over 5,000 hours of flight time in a Douglas DC-8. First officer Beebe also was a very experienced pilot also logging almost 5,000 hours of flight time in the DC-8 too. The air traffic controller Edward Kingrey was on duty during the time of the accident. The flight went smoothly from New York to Denver. As Flight 173 was approaching Portland it was not
On a Douglas DC-8 there are two rods, one for each wing that spring up when the landing gear is down. The flight engineer could’ve possibly went and checked if the landing gear was down manually. This accident was not a very unique accident to be fair of flight 173 but is a rare thing to come across. Some accidents that are very similar to this include the 2008 British Airways flight 38. The landing gear was faulty and did not go down all the way. These two flights are very similar in terms of cause of accident. Yes, the DC-8 did crash because of fuel loss but if Captain McBroom did not decide to fly a holding pattern around Portland then he would’ve maybe ended the same way British Airways Flight 38 did. No passengers were killed in that accident. Going back to the DC-8 crash they did miss one thing they might have overlooked. The Lightbulb powering the landing gear light may have been faulty. This could be the case but the real problem was the excessive burning of fuel during the flight. An average DC-8 burns fuel at a rate of 13,000 lbs. of fuel per hour but showing that they did have more than enough fuel to get from Denver to Portland then why did they run out of fuel in such a short time. Some other factors that