i apologize for being late. we had a lot 20 do today, and we re making an effort to try to brief the family members about the information we re releasing prior to briefing the media. this morning i had a chance to meet with our investigators at the accident site and see some of the progress on the work. i m going to talk to you about some of the things that we ve completed in the last 24 hours and some of the things that we ll be working on. our power plants team is finishing up some of their onscene work right now. they identify that there was a post crash fire on the inboard section of the number 2 engine. that s the right engine. an oil tank had ruptured and leaked fuel on to the hot engine. they identified that both thrust reversers were stowed and that
problems. let s see what happens. bounces a couple of times, you can see the thrust reversers come out on the engines there, and it s a picture-perfect landing. apparently, a nonevent. they had some kind of an indicator in the cockpit that told them that their gear was not necessarily down and locked. and if that happens, you can have a gear collapse. we re going to be showing you some pictures of what happened to an airliner where that very thing happened, the gear did not come down. we re going to be showing you some pictures of that amazing landing coming up. this one appears to be okay. coast guard investigators trying to determine what caused a seattle water taxi to crash into a seawall. seven people wound up in the hospital as a result, more than 70 people were onboard the rachel marie at the time of this accident, many of them shaken up by the impact. we smashed into the wall, and it was horrible. it was, it was horrible. the hardest impact i ve ever felt. it threw everybo
and slide around as was described earlier. with it sliding left to right, left to right as thrust reversers are trying to push back. literally tlufrting, like you turned the engine back the other way and throttled up to go back the other way and combat that. this pilot had a lot on his hands to land in those situations. i m told there s a picture i haven t seen yet. try to put that up. and miles it looks torn up. explain what we re seeing there. waiting for the delay in my cable to give me picture. what i am seeing though is yeah. that is that material, it s designed to allow a typical truck or people or whatever to walk over it on normal day but weight of aircraft it sinks through and arrests the forward
left and banks into that berm and nearly into flushing bay. a very close call indeed. we don t know what caused the plane to lose control. we don t. we know the plane was coming in from atlanta. probably at somewhere around 150 miles per hour or so maybe a bit more or less but that s normal, but it is coming in on a runway that is notoriously short. in other words, anybody coming into laguardia knows this is a challenging airport and challenging runways in the best of conditions. if you re coming in in a snow type of environment, it s slick, it s wet, it is slippery. that could be very dangerous. you ve got to be at your a-game. where did they touch down on the runway will be a question what was their speed? how did the braking go? what about the thrust reversers? those are devices almost like pots or half-clams, if you will that fit over the engines that reverses the thrust of the
it hits this bank. thankfully, that berm prevented it from going into the water. they ve now closed this entire runway, runway 13 if you re going this way, 31 if you re coming this way. they would hope to start landing planes on this runway at some point this afternoon. that really depends on the weather. it depends on the situation on the ground. the ntsb is now going to be looking at a number of things. how fast was this plane coming in? when did they apply their brakes? when did they apply the thrust reversers? that s critical. why? because if you come in too hard and hit the thrust reversers too hard, especially on a situation where you have icy or snow-packed conditions and maybe a cross wind it s entirely possible you could literally lose control of the plane and it will kind of do a fish tail out from underneath you. that may have been and i underscore may have been what happened here. so the ntsb is going to be looking at speed, braking, thrust reversers, all of that.