United Airlines flight aborts takeoff after control problems

The incident at Las Vegas' McCarron International Airport highlights growing concern about control problems with the 737, the most common jetliner with more than 3,100 in use around the world.

Flight 2559, bound for Los Angeles, was scheduled to take off from McCarron at 12:55 p.m. Saturday when "unexplained yaw problems" occurred, United spokesman Joe Hopkins said.

The takeoff was aborted, but the plane did leave McCarron about 5 1/2 hours later, Hopkins said without elaborating.

"They fixed the problem and the flight resumed," added airport spokesman John Hanks.

Skip Royston, an electronics engineer who was a passenger aboard the flight, told The Associated Press that the plane went into a left-to-right yaw and the rudder was "swinging rapidly."

"How did I know this was happening? Because that was my job, to put this type of failure in flight simulators for B-52 bombers," Royston said. "I felt like I was in a dream, that I was back on that job. I knew exactly what was going on.

"The next thing that's supposed to happen is a crash."

Royston said he ran flight simulator tests for the U.S. military for two years and recognized the danger because he had hundreds of hours of practice in avoiding such situations. He said he demanded to be taken off the plane after it returned to the gate.

"Every one of these 737s should be grounded until this problem is fixed," Royston said. "I'm filing a complaint with the FAA on Monday. How many people are going to have to die before this is addressed?"

A phone message for Boeing representatives was not returned Sunday.

On March 24, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that rudder problems caused two fatal airline crashes and nearly triggered a third.

Boeing Co. and the Federal Aviation Administration, however, said the rudder problems were already being eliminated, the National Transportation Safety Board called for them to work together to devise further improvements.

Charlie Higgins, Boeing's vice president of airplane safety, said then that the 737 has an excellent safety record, with 77 million departures since it was introduced in 1967.

The NTSB made its finding at the end of a two-day hearing into the cause of the 1994 crash of USAir Flight 427. The plane, a 737, suddenly spiraled into a ravine outside Pittsburgh after a flight from Chicago. All 132 aboard were killed.

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