Black boxes fail to shed any light on plane crash

Hugh Naylor

• Last Updated: November 19. 2009 11:07PM UAE / November 19. 2009 7:07PM GMT

SHARJAH // The investigation into the fatal crash last month of a Boeing 707 cargo plane has suffered a serious setback after authorities were unable to retrieve information from the aircraft’s flight data recorders.

The two devices, which monitor cockpit conversations and aircraft vital signs, failed to record the jetliner’s final moments before crashing shortly after take-off at Sharjah International Airport, Saif al Suwaidi, the head of the General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA), said.

“If they were working,” he said, “maybe they would give us more clues as to what actually happened. But now you have to depend on different things to get to the causes of the crash.”

The recorders, also known as black boxes, were retrieved from the wreckage and sent for analysis to the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).

But, Mr al Suwaidi said: “There was no good information on the black boxes.

“Maybe it’s because it wasn’t well-maintained, or there was a defect in the black boxes themselves,” he said. “But, unfortunately, they were not operating properly.”

A spokesman for the AAIB, which previously confirmed receiving a UAE government request to examine the black boxes, would only say it performed the task requested of it by the GCAA. He deferred all other questions to the UAE officials.

The crash happened on October 21, about two minutes after take-off, killing all six Sudanese crewmen on board and narrowly missing nearby neighbourhoods.

Aviation experts say the likelihood that the black boxes could have been irreparably damaged during impact is small.

Typically encased in half a centimetre of stainless steel, and capable of withstanding temperatures of more than 1,100C, they are purposely designed to endure extreme conditions.

Ronan Hubert, of the Aircraft Crashes Record Office, a Geneva-based research organisation, said he could not recall an incident where the recorders were destroyed because of a crash.

“The black boxes may not have been up-to-date, and the company didn’t do what was necessary to keep them maintained and updated.”

If the latter was confirmed, he said, then Azza Air Transport, the Sudanese cargo company operating the flight, could be subject to legal sanctions. The company has been suspended indefinitely from flying in UAE airspace.

Officials at Azza, which flew regular flights from Sharjah to its headquarters in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, could not be reached for comment.

What seems more likely, according to Phil Smith, the chairman of the Flight Operations Group of the Aerospace International Royal Aeronautical Society in Britain, is that the recorders had not been switched on.

Generally, he said, flight recorders are automatically activated when the aircraft starts.

“If they’re not recording during the flight, that’s either because they’ve not been turned on or because they’ve got a fault,” he said. “On the face of it, it seems unlikely that two separate recorders would have faults that prevented them from recording. This suggests, for whatever reason, they were not turned on.”

He added, however, that it would be difficult to be certain without more details from the operator and investigators.

Meanwhile, Mr al Suwaidi said that investigators from the US would soon be flying to the UAE to assist in the inquiry into the crash.

Previously, the GCAA had planned to send remains of the plane’s four turbofan engines, two of which are essentially intact, to laboratories in America. Mr al Suwaidi said a team of about seven experts from the National Transportation Safety Board, the US body charged with investigating accidents, were scheduled to arrive in the next few days.

Government officials from the country where a downed aeroplane was manufactured, including repr esentatives of the manufacturer itself, often take part in such investigations.

“We thought that it would be faster to do this than sending the engines somewhere else,” Mr al Suwaidi said, adding that the team was “on its way now”.




hnaylor@thenational.ae