The National Transportation Safety Board has barred American Airlines from participating in the investigation of an incident in which one of its planes slid off of a Wyoming runway last week.
The decision stems from American officials downloading information from the flight-data recorders, rather than following the standard procedure of turning over material to the NTSB first.
“Although a thorough examination by our investigators determined that no information from the [recorder] was missing or altered in any way, the breach of protocol by American Airlines personnel violates the Safety Board’s standards of conduct for any organization granted party status in an NTSB investigation,” NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman said in a statement.
She added that the procedures in place are “vital to the integrity of our investigative processes.”
This marks the first time in decades that federal authorities have imposed this punishment.
A spokeswoman for American said that the company’s handling of the recorders was normal, and that there “was no attempt to circumvent any collaborative process with the NTSB,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
The incident took place on Wednesday, when an American jet slid off the runway in Jackson Hole, Wyo., crashing into packed snow 600 feet beyond the edge of the landing strip. There were no injuries, but federal authorities launched an investigation to determine the cause of the accident shortly thereafter.
The mishap came almost exactly a year after another American jet skidded off the end of a runway. In the previous case, a landing plane broke apart after sliding off of a wet runway in Jamaica. There were no fatalities in that incident, though scores of passengers were injured.
