Summary Faulty radio altimeter led to engine power reduction, speed loss, & stall. Crew error exacerbated the situation by not reacting to faulty data promptly. Systemic issues included subpar pilot training and Boeing design flaws & oversight.
On February 25, 2009, Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 (TC-JGE), a Boeing 737-800 model 8F2 named Tekirdağ, crashed while attempting to land at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport (AMS). The incident, now known as the 'Polderbaan Incident,' resulted in 9 fatalities and 120 reported injuries among 128 passengers and 7 crew members, making it one of the deadliest aviation accidents in recent Dutch history. The crash was the result of a complex web of technical failures, human errors, and systemic issues within the airline industry, with blame shared among multiple parties.
We’re taking a closer look at the factors that led to this tragic event. A technical failure: the faulty radio altimeter The primary cause of the crash was a malfunctioning radio altimeter. The radio altimeter is a critical component that measures the aircraft's altitude above the ground by bouncing a radio signal off of the ground and recording the response time, providing data to various automated systems, including the autothrottle.
On Flight 1951, the left-hand radio altimeter malfunctioned, incorrectly reporting the aircraft’s altitude as negative 8 feet repeatedly in the days leading up to the crash, and it malfunctioned again as the plane descended below 1,950 feet.