From Roselawn to Brazil: A Survey of Weather-related Aviation Accidents from the Perspective of a Certified Consulting Meteorologist

The ATR-72 accident near Roselawn, Indiana, on October 31, 1994 was the presenter's introduction to the world, and business, of forensic aviation meteorology. This well-studied accident involved the gradual buildup of airframe icing that the crew was not aware of and resulted in the deaths of all aboard, 68 people in all. While still in its early stages of investigation at the time of this writing, the ATR-72 accident near Vinhedo, Brazil, on August 9, 2024 may also have been related to airframe icing. Several meteorologists were retained by the various parties in the Roselawn litigation, including the presenter who had the privilege of working with two AMS Honorary Members, Professor Ted Fujita and William Haggard, CCM, of Climatological Consulting Corporation, on the weather investigation for one of the parties. The contributions of Professor Fujita and Mr. Haggard to aviation safety cannot be overstated. The type, quantity and quality of weather data and methods of analysis have greatly advanced since Professor Fujita's creation of weather radar images used in the Roselawn investigation, though the fundamental physical reasoning by the consulting meteorologist is largely unchanged. Since the Roselawn accident 30 years ago, a number of other major, newsworthy or unusual accidents related to weather conditions have occurred in various parts of the world, although fortunately the number of commercial accidents, particularly, in the U.S., has generally declined during that period. Some examples briefly reviewed are the USAF CT-43A crash near Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April 1996, during which US Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and many others were killed, the Boeing 747 Korean Air flight into terrain on Guam in August 1997, one of the deadliest aviation accidents in history, and the Sikorsky helicopter accident near Calabasas, California, in January 2020, in which the basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven other people died. Many other lesser known, but equally tragic, accidents that involved the weather, or, occasionally, lack of awareness of the weather or weather forecasts on the part of the crew or others, have occurred since 1994. Although there are often common denominators among accidents, such as convective turbulence, poor visibility, low ceilings, or icing, each unique accident required a thorough analysis by consulting meteorologists to ascertain the conditions encountered by the aircraft. The results of each analysis then needed to be effectively communicated to the clients in the litigation, which involved bridging the gap between the scientific and legal worlds and, if needed, effectively presenting it to the "trier of fact" in the contentious environment of a courtroom. That bridge is often much more difficult to cross than the bridge of the meteorological investigation itself.