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DENVER - Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board are concentrating on the glide slope instrumentation and the pilot operations in their investigation of why an American Airlines Flight landed 350 feet short of the runway at Denver International Airport Sunday morning.
It was snowing, icy and instruments-only when American Airlines Flight 1115 from Dallas landed at DIA. The MD80 would have been on glide slope instrumentation to keep it on the right descent for landing. If the plane is too high or too low, an alarm voice should have sounded in the cockpit. The instrumentation depends on instruments on the ground and in the plane. DIA says its system on the ground was tested after the plane landed and DIA's instrumentation was working. Most of the equipment from the plane has been sent to Washington D.C. for analysis.
The MD80 hit approach lights and landed on a lighter-weight concrete short of the runway.
The First Officer, as opposed to the Captain, was flying the plane. That's considered routine.
Debris from the broken lights and the plane was strewn along the runway for 700 feet. That was a potential problem for other planes that landed after AA Flight 1115 landed. Evidently, the pilots didn't know they'd hit the lights because they didn't report it to DIA operations until about 25 minutes after the accident happened.