Ameristar Charters Flight 9363

Ameristar Charters Flight 9363 was a charter flight from Willow Run Airport to Washington Dulles Airport. On March 8, 2017, the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 (DC-9-83) operating the flight rejected takeoff and overran the runway. The crash was caused by a jammed elevator, which was damaged by high winds the day before the crash.

All 116 passengers and crew survived the crash, with only one minor injury, but the aircraft was damaged beyond repair. The NTSB investigation found that the elevator was damaged while the aircraft was parked, and then was not noticed due to flaws in the aircraft's design and Ameristar's operating procedures.

Accident

The aircraft had been chartered to transport the Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team to the Big Ten tournament in Washington, D.C. for the following day's game against the Illinois Fighting Illini. Prior to the flight, the aircraft had been parked at Willow Run Airport since it arrived from Lincoln Airport in Lincoln, Nebraska on March 6.

Hours before the accident, the air traffic control tower at Willow Run Airport had been evacuated due to high winds. The windstorm affected much of Southeast Michigan, and resulted in power outages for over 800,000 DTE customers. A power outage at Willow Run disabled most of the weather instrumentation in the airport's automated surface observing system (ASOS), and manual weather observations were also unavailable due to the evacuation of the control tower.

As a result, the flight crew of Flight 9363 obtained weather information from alternate sources, contacting company operations personnel for a temperature setting, and calling the nearby Detroit Metropolitan Airport on one of the pilots' cell phones to get the current weather information at the latter airport. Lacking information from the ASOS, the crew used windsocks at the airport to determine the predominant wind direction and inform their choice of runway. The flight crew modified their planned takeoff to protect against the danger of wind shear, selecting a higher rotation speed than would otherwise be prescribed.

The flight was delayed slightly, due to the communication difficulties caused by the power outages at the airport. Flight 9363 taxied uneventfully to runway 23L, and received its takeoff clearance from Detroit Metropolitan via cell phone due to the lack of ATC services at Willow Run. The check airman acting as pilot in command, 41-year-old Andreas Gruseus, directed the captain, 54-year-old Mark Radloff, to begin the takeoff roll, which began at 14:51:12 EST. The takeoff roll was normal until rotation speed (VR), at 150 kn indicated airspeed (KIAS). At VR, when the captain pulled back on the control column to rotate the aircraft, the aircraft failed to respond, even after the captain applied additional back force to the control column. Judging the aircraft to be incapable of flight, the captain performed a rejected takeoff, immediately applying maximum braking followed by spoilers and reverse thrust.

By the time the captain rejected the takeoff, the aircraft had accelerated to 173 kn, over 30 kn above the decision speed (V1), and was moving too fast to stop in the remaining runway distance. The aircraft ran off the end of the runway and across the grassy runway safety area (RSA), before striking the raised pavement of an access road along the airport perimeter. Upon striking the road pavement, the aircraft's landing gear collapsed, and the aircraft slid on its belly over the road and a ditch just beyond, causing substantial damage to the belly and underside of the nose. The aircraft came to a stop with its empennage on the road and its nose in a grassy field on the far side of the road and ditch.

An orderly, rapid evacuation followed. The aircraft had 8 emergency exits, of which 4 were used. One emergency exit was rendered unusable by a faulty evacuation slide, and another was blocked by a seatbelt stuck in the door. All 110 passengers and 6 crew members survived the crash, with one injury, a passenger who suffered a laceration to the leg.