Boats Resume Search for Bodies From Plane Crash; Switzerland Says It Banned Airline a Year Ago

Associated Press ^ | Jan 4, 2004 | Salah Nasrawi

[BenLurkin]

Rescuers on Sunday resumed searching for bodies after a charter jet full of French tourists crashed into the Red Sea, killing all 148 people aboard. Switzerland, meanwhile, revealed that it had banned the airline more than a year ago because of safety problems.

Flash Airlines flight FSH604, bound for Paris with a stopover in Cairo, crashed early Saturday, minutes after taking off from the airport at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik. Officials blamed mechanical failure.

Search crews on military and civilian vessels have found only small pieces of wreckage and "very few" body parts from the shark-infested waters near the resort, an official of Egypt's Environment Protection Department said on condition of anonymity.

Egyptian officials said the Flash Airlines jet, an 11-year-old Boeing 737, had checked out fine before the flight. But Swiss aviation authorities said Sunday they had banned Flash from flying into Switzerland for more than a year because of technical worries. "A series of safety shortcomings showed up in a plane of Flash Airlines during a routine security check at Zurich Airport in October 2002," Celestine Perissinotto, spokeswoman for the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Aviation, told The Associated Press.

She declined to go into detail and didn't know what type of plane had problems in Switzerland. Flash Airlines, which has been in business for six years, said in Egypt that the Boeing 737 that crashed was one of two it owned.

The Egyptian government has said the crash was an accident apparently caused by a mechanical problem. It came amid worldwide security alerts for terror threats in the skies.

Search teams also were seeking the "black box" flight data recorders to provide more details about the cause of the crash, Egyptian Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafeeq said.

Tourists in swimsuits and TV crews with satellite dishes watched from the beach Sunday as searchers circled the waters in small boats.

French Deputy Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier told reporters in Sharm el-Sheik, about 300 miles southeast of Cairo near the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula, that the human remains found were so badly mangled that it would be difficult to identify them.

"We were able to see the bags full of body parts, Muselier said, choking back tears after visiting a hospital morgue. "It was terrible to see."

The pilot tried to turn back after detecting problems on takeoff and was making the turn when the plane plunged into the sea, French and Egyptian officials said Saturday.

The environment protection official said rescue workers believed the fuselage of the Boeing 737 was resting in 2,600 feet of water. The depth of the water was hampering search efforts, Shafeeq said.

The search was suspended Saturday night but resumed at daybreak Sunday with four aircraft and 40 boats searching a 4-square-mile expanse of sea.

The governor of South Sinai, Mostafa Afifi, told Egyptian state television that the plane hit the sea so hard that everything shattered. "We can't say that we have found bodies as bodies. We have found 11 to 13 bodies but in pieces," he said.

A French investigation team was expected to arrive later Sunday and French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin declared the nation in mourning. The United States also was sending an accident investigator.

A French Foreign Ministry spokesman said 133 French tourists were on the flight. One Japanese, one Moroccan, and 13 Egyptian crew members also were on the flight, Shafeeq said.

Most of the passengers were on a tour organized by FRAM, one of France's largest travel operators. FRAM said it had 125 people - mostly families or groups of friends - on the flight. Some were children.

Shafeeq said Saturday the plane checked out fine before takeoff. "The first indications suggest a technical fault," he said.

Radar images showed that the plane turned left as normal after takeoff, then suddenly straightened out and turned right before plunging into the sea, Shafeeq said.

The jet arrived at the resort early Saturday from Venice, Italy, dropping off passengers in Sharm el-Sheik, the airline said. New passengers then boarded for the flight to Paris via Cairo. The airplane underwent maintenance checks in Norway and the most recent one showed no problems, officials said.

Perissinotto said the Swiss report had been given to the airline and to Egyptian civil aviation authorities.

The airline has been banned from entering or flying over Switzerland since October 2002, but one of its planes was allowed to make a landing in Geneva last year for exceptional reasons, she added.

That plane was supposed to land in Paris but was diverted to Geneva because of bad weather, she said.

Swiss authorities demanded that the airline explain why it needed to land in Geneva, but "these explanations were also insufficient. The situation had not improved," Perissinotto said.

Saturday's crash was Egypt's biggest aviation disaster since 1999, when an EgyptAir jetliner crashed shortly after leaving New York en route to Cairo, killing all 217 people aboard.

[_Jim]

The qustions is: Why was it out of control?

That question has been answered for those with the ability to do a liitle of their own non-conspiratorial based reseach with the amount of material about this event on the web nowadays - your overlooking some of the more substantative excerpts I've posted above certainly gives me a clue where you're coming from, too; convincing folks such as yourself is an possible task, I'm convinced. All I can do is present the substantial, factual evidence by the competant folks and leave the reading to the readers ...

If you wish continually paint every catastrophic event that has occurred with a conspiratorial paint-brush - have at it. Just remember that technology's operation isn't based on black magic, every physical system has limits and sooner or later a failure can be expected to occur - usually though a combination of adverse circumstances ...

[eno_]

I would fully encourage everyone to do their own research. Google up "unusual attitude" or "midair breakup" and read why planes fall apart in midair. It is vastly predominantly due to the plane being out of control before it breaks up.

There is nothing "conspiratorial" about this. Odds are the plane was out of control before it broke up. With the current manhunt for on-board bombers and the contemporary capture of Richard Reid, the questions is, as I said, which is more likely: A successful bomber, which we know is incontrovertably a grave threat now, and was a real threat with a real example back then, or a mysterious, unprecedented, unrepeated failure for which no fix has been ordered?

[_Jim]

Google up "unusual attitude" or "midair breakup" and read why

Yeah. Why don't we.

But let's look at specifics involving that 13 year old aircraft and it's 13 year old airframe bearing tail number N14053 (AA FLT 587 that day) -

- excerpted from: www.aviationtoday.com/reports/iceberg.htm

• A300-600R N14053's (AA Flt 587's) computer and flight control system: According to the NTSB, N14053's maintenance log revealed that during a preflight check on the morning of the accident, "the yaw damper and a pitch trim control would not engage ... The computer controlling these functions was reset."
• A300 rudder problems: Less than two weeks after AA587, another American A300-600R (tail No. N7055A) fishtailed after takeoff from Lima Peru. Similarly, on May 11, 1999, American A300-600R tail No. N7082A, a third aircraft in American's A300 fleet, during approach to Miami and go-around suffered 5-11 degrees of continuous erratic and uncommanded rudder deflection resulting in extreme yawing.

  Maintenance personnel in Oklahoma had apparently cross-connected wiring from the flight control computers to the yaw actuator valves. (Implementation of a subsequent FAA Airworthiness Directive revealed another aircraft to have been cross-wired.)

  Records reveal that earlier, in September 1996, another American Airlines A300 had just climbed to 31,000 feet when violent shaking began, accompanied by an uncommanded 5-6 Hz. rudder pedal movement that the flight crew could not override. The captain declared an emergency and landed.

  Did AA587's flight data reflect similar uncommanded control issues that led to disaster? Given several instances of cross-wiring and issues with N14053's computerized yaw damper control, could the above instances indicate ongoing problems involving these items and possibly the rudder limiter?

  Is there a maintainability challenge with such increasingly complex systems? And to what extent is computer/autopilot override by the pilot of Airbus aircraft more complex than it needs to be under high-stress emergency conditions?

• A300-600R N14053's (AA Flt 587's) vertical stabilizer: A folded ply had apparently allowed minor separation in the left center fin attachment lug during the manufacturing process more than 13 years earlier. Repaired before delivery with a number of rivets, it was found still firmly attached to the left central fuselage clevis even though the skin and fin structure above the lug had been entirely torn away.

  Were there any equivalent undetected anomalies in the upper portion of the fin? Will the fin's skin and internal structure be completely disassembled to look for such anomalies?

• Previous A300-600R N14053 incidents: In November of 1994, an FAA Incident Data System Report records that this same aircraft encountered clear air turbulence whose severity caused injury to 47 passengers and damage to the aircraft.

  This aircraft was 13 years old.

  How many landing/takeoff cycles had it undergone, involving alternate cold-soak temperatures of -45 degrees Fahrenheit to -60° F at altitude followed by ground temperatures up to 95° F?

  Were there other significant turbulence events [during it's lifetime]?

  Given such stresses and alternating temperature/pressure changes over 13 years and 37,500 flight hours, what were the combined effects on rigidity, integrity, and fatigue-resistance of the composite vertical stabilizer?

  And did extreme rudder movement at 300 mph apply significant torsion along the hingeline of a fin whose stiffness might have degraded, triggering the kind of dangerous aeroelastic divergence hypothesized above?

  It should be noted that while Airbus documents indicate testing over thousands of cycles equivalent to almost three airframe lifetimes, there is no indication of load-bearing testing under the extreme range of temperatures (and pressure changes) involved in the multiple heat-soak/cold-soak cycles experienced in daily service (see ASW, Jan. 14).

Hmmmm ... it seem to me that there's more than enough to look at with just this series of aircraft (the A300 Airbus series) as well as this particular aircraft for potential inherent deisign flaws or service issues (repair mistakes).