Black box indicted crew

Press, 3 December 1979, Page 1

Black box indicted crew

By LES BLOXHAM, travel editor Three survivors of an air crash in the United States five years ago who were awarded $5 million on Friday had been flown by a crew condemned by evidence extracted from the aircraft’s voice recorder. The jury’s decision, reported in “The Press” of Saturday, involved Eastern Airlines Flight 212 which crashed on its approach to Charlotte Airport, North Carolina, on September 11, 1974. Only 10 of the 82 people in the DC9 survived.

The size of the award was probably influenced by the finding of the official investigating board which criticised the crew for its apparent laxity. Drawing heavily from the tapes, the official report determined that the probable cause was “lack of altitude awareness at critical points during the approach due to poor cockpit discipline . . According to the report a transcript from the cockpit voice recorder recovered from the wreckage revealed that the crew had been dis-

cussing politics and joking on their approach to the airport through fog. “Well, what ya think of old Ford givin’ a pardon to Nixon?” “I was surprised . . .” “Now we’re all ready — all we’ve got to do is find the airport . . Six seconds later the tape ended abruptly as the aircraft crashed three miles short of the runway. The finding was sharply challenged by the Airline Pilots’ Association which claimed the investigators had not taken pilot fatigue

into consideration. The association also argued that banter in a cockpit did not necessarily mean that pilots were not flying well. The jury’s award on Friday has pushed the total damages paid by Eastern to $27 million. United States law pays little heed to compensation limits specified in the small print on tickets. For flights involving a stop in the United States the maximum liability of an airline is set at $75,000 unless a claimant can prove negligence.