(Wall Street Journal) Pilots of a United Parcel Service Inc. plane about to land in Birmingham, Ala., on Wednesday received two cockpit warnings that they were descending too rapidly, seconds before the cargo jet clipped some power lines, smashed into trees and slammed into a hill less than a mile from the airport, federal investigators said Friday.
Preliminary analysis of the Airbus A300 freighter’s cockpit-voice recorder revealed that the onboard ground-collision avoidance system—which uses a computer-generated voice—twice issued aural warnings that the plane’s “sink rate” was excessive, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The first warning came about seven seconds prior to the initial impact, according to investigators, followed three seconds later by one of the pilots saying that the intended runway was “in sight.”
