U.S. expert says bomb caused crash

Press, 30 July 1985, Page 10

U.S. expert says bomb caused crash

NZPA-AP London An American expert on cockpit voice recorders believes a bomb caused the crash of the Air-India Boeing 747 jetliner last month, killing all 329 people aboard, the “Observer” newspaper reported. The weekly newspaper quoted Paul Turner, a member of the U.S. Crash Investigation Team, as saying that evidence indicated the event occurred in the firstclass passenger cabin at the nose of the plane. Mr Turner, who flew from Bombay, India, to Ireland last week to confer with British experts at the Royal Aircraft establishment at Farnborough, was also quoted as saying it took only six seconds on June 23 to destroy Air-India flight 182. The jumbo jet crashed into the Atlantic about 193 km off the Irish coast while en route from Canada to India with a planned stop in London. Mr Turner had been in Bombay with other American and Canadian experts assisting the Indian team investigating the crash. Among the evidence they

were reviewing were the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and instrument data recorder, both of which were recovered from the ocean floor more than 1.6 km down. Other investigators have said that wreckage and bodies retrieved from the ocean have shown no evidence of a bomb blast. Mr Turner has formed a tentative conclusion of the final six seconds: the plane stalled, the parts of the jet literally came apart in midflight, the engines separated — the momentum hurling them forward — while the fuselage plummeted, the “Observer” said. Mr B; N. Kirpal, the Indian judge heading the crash investigation, spent yesterday in Cork, Ireland, studying video films of the wreckage taken by the robot that retrieved the black boxes containing the voice and flight recorders. Commodore Advar Singh of the Indian Navy, who is co-ordinating this phase of the search and recovery in Cork, told the Associated Press that the robot was continuing its mapping of the wreckage.