Update at 1:45 p.m. Thursday: National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Eric Weiss said the agency had taken over an investigation into the Boeing 737 that crashed into a ditch on Tuesday at Nashville International Airport because of the level of “substantial damage“ to the airplane.
Reported previously:
A normal flight from Houston to Nashville, a “typical” landing, and then Andy Borchers
felt a sudden bump Tuesday night at Nashville International Airport.
“And the plane seemingly veered off the taxiway,” said Borchers, a Lipscomb University professor who lives in Hermitage.
“I looked at my wife. We looked at each other as though something was wrong … But because we were moving at relatively low speed … you know, you felt a little vibration and bumbling along, but it was only a few seconds.”
Borchers was among 133 passengers and five crewmembers on Southwest Airlines Flight 31, which skidded off the runway at 5:20 p.m.
More:
FAA crash details page
Authorities initially said that eight people suffered minor injuries, like bumps and bruises, when the 737 hit a grassy ditch. One reported chest pain and another reported neck pain, said Nashville Fire Department spokesman Brian Haas. A day later, Southwest Airlines said a ninth person had been injured and that all who visited
hospitals had been treated and released.
Borchers said most on board were buckled at the time — although passengers believed that one unbuckled person might have lost a tooth amid the jostling.
He praised the Southwest crew for tending to elderly passengers when it came time to evacuate on two inflated slides. Some grabbed their carry-on bags (other luggage would be returned about four hours later, he said).
“Everyone I talked with seemed to be in fairly good spirits. Nobody was terribly upset,” Borchers said. “The flight attendant that I spoke with was probably the most shaken of all, obviously having to go through all the procedures she had to do.”
In
a statement Wednesday, Southwest said Nashville was the final destination for most passengers, and that others were given hotel rooms or other connections.
Borchers tweeted a photo of the airplane on its belly in the ditch, triggering a round of social media attention and calls from news outlets around the world.
Airplane ran off runway at BNA!
pic.twitter.com/gugUrmDj0r— Andrew Borchers (@andyborchers)
December 15, 2015
He said passengers were not informed about what happened. The Federal Aviation Administration was investigating and
told The Tennessean
that the
National Transportation Safety Board could take over.
Weiss, with the NTSB, couldn’t say the cause of the crash on Thursday. He said it could be a week before a preliminary report is available.
Borchers said one passenger reported hearing a tire pop, but that was far from confirmed.
“As we talked, we all kind of shook our heads and wondered, ‘How did this happen?’ and there was no easy explanation that any of us could come to,” Borchers said. “If it had been two minutes earlier it would have potentially been very, very serious, because we were going down the runway at 100 miles per hour. As it was, it happened when we were just taxiing at very low speed.”
Earlier this week, another Southwest flight was diverted while over Texas after the pilot noticed a problem with its wing. And in September, two Southwest planes clipped wings while on the ground in Oakland.
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