Aviation

Citation

(2004), "Aviation", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 13 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2004.07313aac.005

Aviation

30 June 2003 – Beni Mered, Algeria

At least 17 people were killed today when a Hercules military transport aircraft crashed into a house near the Algerian capital. The aircraft slammed into the house in Beni Mered shortly after take-off from the Boufarik military airport, 25 miles from Algiers. Among the dead were two women and three children inside the house, as well as five crew members, rescue workers said. A total of seven other people on the ground also died and at least five were injured. It was not immediately clear whether human error, technical problems or weather were to blame. Witnesses said they saw an engine on fire upon take-off.

20 July 2003 – Kenya

A South African-registered aircraft believed to have been carrying a dozen American tourists has crashed into Mount Kenya, apparently killing everyone on board, the senior game warden in the area said today. The three-engine Metroliner ploughed into Point Lenana, the third-highest peak on Mount Kenya, an extinct volcano and Africa's highest mountain, at 18.00hrs, yesterday. Bongo Woodley of the Kenya Wildlife Service said "I have flown over the site and seen the crash, and there do not appear to be any survivors", by telephone from the Mount Kenya National Park headquarters in Naro Moru, 75 miles north of Nairobi. Woodley said he understood that according to a flight plan filed at Nairobi's Wilson Airport, there were 14 people on the aircraft and most were American tourists. No further details were immediately available. Henry Ochieng, head of Air Navigation Services for Kenya's Civil Aviation Authority, did not have firm details about the crash or passengers.

21 July 2003 – A team of Kenyan investigators began sifting through the wreckage today of a chartered plane that slammed into Mount Kenya, killing three generations of an American family and two South African pilots, officials said. The twin-engine Fairchild turboprop was carrying the 12 US tourists to a game reserve when it hit Point Lenana, a peak of Africa's second-highest mountain, said Bongo Woodley, senior Kenya Wildlife Service warden in charge of Mount Kenya National Park. The 21-member team of police investigators and Kenyan Wildlife Services recovery workers reached the site today and began examining wreckage that was scattered over a large area at around 16,000ft, said Kubai Severino, a police official. The cause of the crash was still not known. Civil aviation official Peter Wakahia said the aircraft had been "completely destroyed", and debris was scattered on two rock outcrops on either side of the point of impact. Anne Gaines-Burrill, a director of Air-2000, a South African charter company, said their Fairchild SW-4 aircraft bearing registration number ZSOYI and carrying two South African pilots departed from Lanseria airport near Johannesburg at 06.00hrs, Saturday (19 July) and landed at Nairobi's Wilson Airport about 14.00hrs. About two hours later, the plane took off for Buffalo Springs National Reserve, where it was expected to leave the passengers at an airstrip, officials said. Buffalo Springs is 135 miles north of Nairobi. The aircraft had been expected back at Wilson at 18.00hrs, Saturday, Gaines-Burrill said.

23 July 2003 – A search for the bodies of the 14 people killed in the Mt Kenya plane crash ended yesterday. A total of 13 body bags bearing the mutilated remains were last evening assembled at Austrian Hut on the slopes of Mount Kenya, awaiting transportation to the Kenya Wildlife Service camp in the Mt Kenya National Park. A heavy cloud cover over the mountain hampered efforts to have the bodies airlifted. A 20-man recovery team was also awaiting evacuation from the crash site. The completion of the recovery paves way for investigations into the crash. According to the Chief Inspector of Accidents at the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority, Mr Peter Wakahia, a team of 12 investigators will begin a search for clues this morning. They are from Kenya, USA and South Africa and will be joined by two insurance experts. The decision to call off the search was made after a two-hour meeting by the police, aviation officials and US embassy representatives. Mr Wakahia said detectives will today carry out investigations at the crash scene, but added that the probe may take about a month.

11 August 2003 – Mumbai, India

A helicopter chartered by one of India's largest oil companies and carrying 29 people crashed into the sea off Mumbai, the country's commercial hub, a spokeswoman said today. Four people were rescued by a support vessel for the oil company, said R.M. Sharma, a coast guard deputy inspector-general. "But the rough weather and choppy seas due to the monsoon are not conducive to rescue operations." There were 25 passengers and four crew members aboard the MI-172 helicopter, carrying employees of the Oil and Natural Gas Commission when it plunged into the Bombay High, India's oil and gas exploration area in the Arabian Sea, company spokeswoman Narayani Mahil said. She did not immediately confirm the rescue of four people. The helicopter took off at 12.15hrs, local time, from an offshore rig about 35km from the coast, and plunged into the sea three minutes later, she said.

11 August 2003 – At least three people were killed and 24 were missing after a helicopter crashed off India's western coast today as it ferried employees of a state-run oil company from an offshore rig. The Russian-built Mil Mi-172 helicopter, chartered by India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp., plunged into the sea three minutes into a short flight from a platform in the Neelam field. Angry employees of ONGC, India's largest exploration company, announced an indefinite strike over the crash. There were 29 people on board, including 22 company employees, three contract workers and four crew. The bodies of the pilot and flight engineer have been recovered. Narayani Mahil, a spokeswoman for ONGC, said three people had been rescued, but one of them died in hospital. She said rough seas were hampering the search. "We are hopeful of finding more survivors since they were all wearing lifejackets and some people could have been thrown out as the helicopter disintegrated", Mahil said. Petroleum Minister Ram Naik said the Indian Navy and Coast Guard were searching turbulent seas for survivors into the night. "The aviation ministry will investigate the reasons for the accident", he told a news conference. The helicopter, which took off at 12.15hrs (06.45, UTC), belonged to the privately owned MESCO Airlines, another spokesman for the oil company said. ONGC workers said they had long complained about the safety of the flights and four unions announced an indefinite strike from Wednesday (13 August). "From 06.00 on 13 August all operations in the offshore field and base offices will be stopped", L.K. Mirchandani, President of the Association of Scientific and Technical Officers at ONGC, said. "For the last one year we have been saying the helicopters are not safe, but no one paid any attention." He said the workers' demands included an immediate federal police inquiry into the accident and a review of offshore logistics and transport contracts.

12 August 2003 – Divers have found a helicopter lying upside down in on the muddy bed of the Arabian Sea, a day after it crashed while carrying 29 people from an offshore oil rig to the Bombay coast. There were 25 passengers and four crew members aboard the Russian-made MI-172 helicopter chartered by the state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp. when it plunged into Bombay High, an oil field off India's western coast. Two oil company employees survived. Rescuers recovered only three bodies, including the pilot. The bodies of others are feared to be trapped inside the helicopter, but the divers were unable to see inside it, Coast Guard Commandant v. Andarasan said. "It is pitch dark out there. The waters are muddy; the visibility is very poor", Andarasan said of the difficulties faced by the divers due to rainy weather. "The divers are still trying to hook the helicopter to the support vessels", he said. Some six to seven vessels loaded with cranes are believed to have been deployed for the search operation. Angry employees prevented ONGC's managing director Subir Raha from visiting the company's operating base at Bombay High. A group of 50 employees shouted slogans and threw stones at his car, smashing its windscreen. Workers at ONGC, India's largest oil exploration company, also declared an indefinite strike to demand improved safety measures.

12 August 2003 – Alaska Airlines, Flight 261

Alaska Airlines will not face criminal charges over the crash of Flight 261 in 2000, federal investigators have decided. The decision was revealed yesterday in a quarterly filing by corporate parent Alaska Air Group Inc. with the Securities and Exchange Commission and was confirmed by a spokesman for the US attorney's office in San Francisco. "In July, 2003, the US attorney's office informed Alaska that, after a review of all of the relevant information, it has concluded that the evidence does not warrant the filing of criminal charges and it has closed its investigation into the Flight 261 accident", the filing stated. The investigation stems from the crash of an Alaska Airlines McDonnell Douglas MD-83 (N963AS) in the Pacific Ocean off Port Hueneme, California, on 31 January 2000, on a flight from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Francisco and Seattle. All 88 people on board died. At the time of the crash, the US attorney's office in San Francisco had begun a grand jury investigation into the Alaska Airlines maintenance base at Oakland, CA, and that probe was expanded to cover the crash. In December 2001, federal investigators decided not to file charges over maintenance operations and suspended their crash probe pending completion of a separate inquiry by the National Transportation Safety Board. A year later, the board issued a report finding the airline at fault for insufficient lubrication of the jackscrew assembly, which is used to move the horizontal stabiliser, a wing-like structure on the tail that is used to direct the nose up or down. The criminal probe was resumed, taking into account that and other board findings, but has now concluded. All but one of the wrongful death lawsuits filed by crash victims against the carrier and Boeing Co have also been settled. Only the amount of damages remains at issue in the remaining case. In the settlement, Alaska Air conceded legal liability for the crash and Boeing, which purchased McDonnell Douglas Corp. after the aircraft was made, agreed not to contest liability. A lawyer said each set of survivors would receive about $2-20m.

20 August 2003 – Kamchatka, Russia

Authorities in the Russian Far East lost contact today with a helicopter that was carrying a regional governor and 16 other people over the volcanos of the Kamchatka peninsula, emergency officials said. The Mi-8 helicopter had been flying with three crew members and 14 passengers, including Sakhalin Governor Igor Farkhutdinov, from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Severo-Kurilsk on the Kuril Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. The crew failed to make contact with ground control at the appointed time, and hours later there was still no word. Soon after, darkness fell over the region, complicating search efforts. Rescuers were focusing their search on a 200km long swath of the Kamchatka peninsula, said Valery Molokanov, an officer in the emergency ministry's crisis centre in Moscow. Molokanov told Rossiya television that Russian border guards never saw the helicopter cross the Kamchatka shoreline on its way to the islands.

23 August 2003 – The governor of Russia's oil-rich Sakhalin Island and 19 other people were killed in a helicopter crash, officials said today after the wreck was found following a three-day search. The search for the Mi-8 helicopter, found on a remote hillside, was hampered by bad weather in Russia's far east. Traffic controllers lost track of the craft flying from the Kamchatka peninsula to an island in the Kuriles chain in the Pacific. "They are all dead. There is virtually nothing left of the helicopter, it was smashed to pieces", an official at the Emergencies Ministry's far eastern branch told Reuters. He said the body of Sakhalin governor Igor Farkhutdinov and two other officials had been identified. "It is already dark out there. We have identified as many people as we could", the officer said. Farkhutdinov was a key figure in negotiating production sharing deals with some of the world's biggest oil firms, which have pledged to invest billions of dollars in the offshore sector of Sakhalin, one of Russia's youngest oil provinces. Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said the wreck was found by a local airlines helicopter employed in the search some 70 miles south of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the city on the Kamchatka peninsula from which the doomed craft took off. Deputy Emergencies Minister Gennady Korotkin told Interfax news agency there were 20 people aboard the governor's helicopter, setting straight three days of confusion over the number, which stemmed from the absence of a full boarding list. Prosecutors have already launched an investigation into alleged irregularities concerning the flight. Korotkin said the bodies would be evacuated to Petropavlovsk- Kamchatsky tomorrow. Officials have refused to speculate about the cause of the crash, saying the only thing that could so far be ruled out was collision with another aircraft. Russian media have said the craft might have hit a mountain or severe air turbulence that often develops over the area famous for its picturesque landscape of hills and volcanoes.

25 August 2003 – Haitien, Haiti

A commuter aircraft exploded and crashed after take-off on Sunday from Haiti's northern city of Cap Haitien, killing all 21 on board, news reports said. Five minutes after it took off on Sunday afternoon, witnesses saw smoke billowing from the twin-propeller craft which sent distress signals to the Cap Haitien control tower, Radio Maxima reported. There was an explosion and crash, witnesses told the radio station's director Jean-Robert Lalane. It was unclear whether the explosion came before or after the crash, he said. He added that thousands of people had gathered around the fuming wreckage at Lory, about 5km west of the city, in a sugarcane field strewn with the charred bodies of the 19 passengers, pilot and co-pilot. The 19-passenger Czech-made Let L-410, which was on its way to Port-de-Paix, belonged to Tropical Airways, a Haitian company that runs daily flights to and from major Haitian cities.

26 August 2003 – A plane that crashed in Haiti, killing all 21 people aboard, had its engines replaced three weeks earlier and was dangerously overloaded, officials said today. The Tropical Airways Let L-410 took off at 16.00hrs, Sunday (24 August) with too many passengers and too much baggage, a senior manager at the Cap-Haitien airport told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. "While the plane has capacity for 19 passengers, only 17 should be allowed on board for safety purposes", he said. Tropical Airways said most passengers on the plane bound for Port-de-Paix, about 45 miles west of Cap-Haitien, were Haitians living in the Bahamas who were returning for a religious festival. Shortly after the plane took off, smoke billowed out and a back hatch opened, allowing baggage to tumble out, witnesses said. The aircraft nose-dived into a sugarcane field and exploded in northern Haiti. The Communications Plus public relations firm, hired by Tropical Airways, said the plane's two engines had been replaced three weeks before the crash. The firm said the plane was not equipped with a data recorder. It was unclear if the engines were new, said Ely Pierre, a spokesman for the firm. Tropical Airways continued to operate daily flights today to major Haitian cities and to the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands. Haiti's National Office of Civil Aviation promised to increase oversight, but director Jean-Lemaire Pierre said there was no need to cancel flights.

(Extracted from Lloyds Casualty Week, Vol. 333 No. 3-Vol. 334 No. 10, 2003).