What REALLY Happened to United Flight 169 at Newark?

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]You ask me that.

[00:00:09]>> That is one delivery route nobody wants to explain to dispatch. Yeah, I'm running late because a 767 hit my truck.

[00:00:16]Well, thankfully the bread truck driver reportedly avoided serious injury and everyone on board United Flight 169 was okay. Now, here comes the question. How did a widebody jet, still under control, get low enough before the runway to hit traffic on the highway? My name is William and you're watching Blackbox Analyst. Let's check this out.

[00:00:40]So, let's start with the simplest question. How low was this airplane really? Runway 29 at Newark Liberty International Airport uses a standard 3° visual glide path. On that path, you're crossing the threshold at about 60 ft.

[00:00:56]That's the reference. The whole approach is built around the poppy system, the aiming point. Everything ties back to that geometry. This runway also has a displaced threshold about 224 ft and a landing distance just over 6,500 ft.

[00:01:12]It's shorter than the main runways at Newark, but still well within what a Boeing 767-400 can handle. None of that by itself is unusual. What matters is where the impact happened. The truck wasn't hit at the runway. It was hit out on the New Jersey Turnpike roughly 630 ft before the threshold. So, just picture that for a second. You're still a couple hundred yard from the runway, not even over the pavement yet. On a normal glide path, you should still have solid clearance over anything below you. Not huge, but enough that trucks, light poles, all of that stays well out of the airplane's path. Now add a few real world details.

[00:01:51]The roadway is slightly elevated. The truck itself has height and the landing gear on a 767 sits well below the fuselage. So your margin is already thinner than it looks from the cockpit.

[00:02:03]But even with all that, you're still not supposed to be anywhere close to contact. In this case, based on the footage and the impact point, the airplane looks like it was only about 10 to 15 feet above the roadway. That's the part that stands out because now we're not talking about being just a little low. We're talking about being far enough below the expected path that objects on a highway become part of the approach. So naturally, the next thought is, did this happen all at once? Did the airplane just drop right at the last second? When you look at the preliminary ADSB data, it doesn't really point that way. The track follows the general shape of the RNA visual approach. Speed comes down as expected. The airplane lines up and it still ends up touching down around the 1,000 ft aiming markers from the outside. That looks like a normal landing, which is what makes this interesting. The airplane stayed controllable, stayed aligned, and still reached the touchdown zone, but it got there from a path that was already lower than it should have been on short final.

[00:03:09]So the next question kind of asks itself. What would pull an airplane into that kind of path without it immediately standing out as a problem?

[00:03:21]To answer that, you have to look at the environment they were flying into.

[00:03:25]Runway 29 and Newark is shorter than the main runways, and when winds favor it, traffic is brought in from the west, often on a tighter visual pattern. On short final, you're coming in over a busy highway, cars moving underneath you, structures near the threshold, the runway right ahead, and an urban background behind it all. Visually, it's a compressed picture. Everything feels closer together. From the cockpit, that can make the runway look like it's right there, even when you're still a bit farther out. And when that happens, it doesn't take much for a slightly low path to feel acceptable. Now, add in how this approach was actually flown. The aircraft was cleared for the Arnav runway 29 approach, specifically the Arnav Whiskey. That brings you into position and then you continue visually to the runway. So, you're not riding a full ILS glide slope all the way down.

[00:04:17]You're transitioning to visual references. At that point, the main vertical reference becomes the poppy.

[00:04:24]You know what that looks like? Two red, too white puts you on the 3° path. More red, you're low. So the question becomes what were they seeing there and how quickly did it change? Then there's the wind. Around the time of the approach, winds were reported around 290 at 19 knots gusting to 30. Tower gave a similar call 3000 at 15 gusting 30.

[00:04:50]>> United 169 heavy hello wind 30 05 gust 31 runway 29 clear to land.

[00:04:56]>> Clear to land 29. United 169. That's a noticeable gust spread, especially on a short, visually flown final. Even in a large airplane, gusts like that can move you around. Not in a dramatic, outofcontrol way, but enough that your descent rate isn't perfectly steady.

[00:05:13]Your corrections aren't perfectly smooth, and your sense of the approach has a bit of motion to it. The ADSB data lines up with that. Descent rates weren't fixed. You see values around 600, 800, just over 1,000 ft per minute.

[00:05:29]Ground speed comes down from about 160 knots to around 140 as the airplane turns into the wind. Speed control looks fine. Direction looks fine, but vertically it's a little busier. So now put all of that together. You've got a visual segment instead of a precision glide slope. You've got gusty winds nudging your descent rate up and down.

[00:05:52]You've got a short runway environment with a highway right before the threshold, and you've got a picture out the window that can make the runway feel closer than it really is. None of those by themselves would necessarily cause a problem. But stack them up, and it becomes easier to see how the airplane could end up just a bit low, then stay a bit low and not have that immediately feel like something is seriously wrong.

[00:06:15]From the cockpit, it can still look organized. You're lined up. You're on speed. The runway is right there. And the touchdown zone is reachable.

[00:06:23]Everything feels like it's coming together. Except the vertical path just before the runway is no longer where it needs to be. So, by the time the airplane reaches the highway, only a few feet above it, the situation has already been building for a while. Which brings up the next question. At that point, with that little clearance left, was there actually any way to save it?

[00:06:48]The airplane is on short final around 140 knots over the ground. Descent rates in the data are moving through the 600 to 1,000 ft per minute range with one value even higher. To make that feel real, at around 800 ft per minute, you're coming down at roughly 13 ft every second. At 1,400 ft per minute, that's over 20 ft per second. So, if the airplane is only 10 to 15 feet above the roadway, you're basically out of time.

[00:07:16]Adding thrust isn't instant. There's a short delay before the engines respond, and the airplane keeps descending during that time. Pitch doesn't solve it either. Lift takes time to build, and at that height, there's not much of it left to work with. There's also a detail that explains why the impact was so direct.

[00:07:34]The 767's landing gear is angled slightly forward. So when you're low enough, it reaches out ahead of the airplane. It doesn't just miss things, it runs into them. From the images, the aircraft also appears slightly banked left, which would put that left main gear even lower relative to the truck.

[00:07:53]So by the time the airplane reaches the highway that low, there isn't really a meaningful recovery left. The important part isn't what happened at the last second. It's that the chance to fix this was earlier when there was still altitude and time.

[00:08:10]Okay. Now, when you look at this from the outside, you might also ask, why not just go around? But from inside the cockpit, the picture can feel very different. ADSB shows a recognizable RN NAV visual path. Ground speed settles around 140 knots. The airplane is lined up and still lands near the 1,000 ft markers. So, from the crew's perspective, this likely still looked like a workable approach. That's where it gets tricky. The issue here wasn't direction or speed. It was the vertical path before the threshold. And that's not always obvious, especially in gusty conditions. Descent rates were moving around. And with wind gusts, that can feel like normal correction rather than a clear warning sign. So, you can end up with an approach that feels stable even as it's gradually slipping lower than it should. Then, there's the visual side.

[00:09:00]On this approach, the poppy is your main vertical reference. If the airplane was that low over the highway, it would have been indicating below glide path at some point. The real question is timing. When did that become clear enough to act on?

[00:09:14]Was it early enough to call a goaround or did it build slowly until the runway was already right there? Because a goaround needs altitude and time to work. By the time the airplane reached the highway, there wasn't enough of either left. But earlier in the approach, there likely was. And that's the key [music] takeaway. The critical moment wasn't at the impact. It was earlier when the airplane was already low, but still had room to climb away.

[00:09:41]At the end of the day, this could have been a much more serious situation.

[00:09:45]Thankfully, no one seriously hurt and no loss of life. There are still a lot of questions to answer, especially around the approach path, the winds, and the timing of the goaround decision. The NTSB will work through all of that and we'll likely get a clearer picture pretty soon. So, for now, we wait and see what the data actually shows.

[00:10:05][music] Thank you so much for watching and see you in the next one.