Flight 88 · Airbus Industrie A320-232
Airbus Industrie A320-232 · Incident: loss of control on ground/water during landing
From Ontario International Airport (ONT) to John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC01IA068
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Airbus Industrie A320-232
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A320
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N509JB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ontario International Airport (ONT), Ontario, CATo John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), Jamaica, NY
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 121: Air Carrier
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · landing roll
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Loss of control on ground/water
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Aircraft performance, landing capability › Exceeded
- Pilot in command › Planned approach, performed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight crew planned and briefed for an autoland to runway 4R, with winds from 340 degrees at 17 knots, and gusts to 23 knots. The runway had been plowed, and was covered with thin wet snow. On final approach to runway 4R, the control tower gave the pilots winds from 340 degrees at 15 knots, and braking action poor. About 1 second after nose wheel touchdown, the airplane deviated left and the auto-pilot system corrected back. About 11 seconds after touchdown, the airplane deviated left again, did not correct back, and the pilot disconnected the autopilot to regain directional control. He was unable to restore runway heading, and kept the airplane straight as it departed the runway on the left side. The MU readings given to the flight crew, and on the ATIS, of .28, .28, and .26 were 5 hours old. A more recent MU reading of .21, .23, and .24, was 3 hours old, and had not been placed on the ATIS. The control tower did not have a tracking procedure in place for adding revised MU readings to the ATIS, nor was it required. However, airport operations personnel reported they had transmitted the revised readings to the control tower. The airplane FCOM stated, "...automatic roll out performance has been approved on dry and wet runway, but performance has not been demonstrated on snow covered or icy runway." Heavy snow had been falling earlier. Light snow was reported at the 0506 and all subsequent weather observations. The runway was last plowed and treated 3 hours earlier. An FAA inspector reported the runway condition was loose snow over patches of hard packed snow and ice.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to perform an auto rollout on a snow contaminated runway, which had not been demonstrated, and which resulted in a loss of directional control, when the capability of the autoland system to maintain directional control was exceeded. Factors were the failure of the control tower to ensure that the results of the latest MU reading were available to the pilots, the crosswind, and the snow covered runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC01IA068
- Event ID
- 20010212X00438
- Case number
- NYC01IA068
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, coordinates, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c553746d1588da797991befd60c817e204839e437296eb0bb0bba3b32357a374; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:17:19.925Z.