Mystery of moments that cost 329 lives

Press, 9 August 1985, Page 17

Mystery of moments that cost 329 lives

By

VICTOR SMART,

London “Observer”

aviation correspondent

Each day 250,000 travellers board nearly 600 Boeing 7475. These jumbo jets, the first of the wide-bodied planes, have an impressive safety record. Since they came into service 15 years ago, the 747 s have covered 8400 million miles, carrying 576 million passengers, and there have been 12 accidents, one possibly attributable to the plane itself. In a matter of six seconds that hard-won reputation was severely shaken when the Air India flight from Toronto to Bombay, already preparing for its stop-off at Heathrow airport, plunged from 31,000 feet, killing the 329 people on board on Sunday. June 23.

Those six seconds, according to Paul Turner, a member of the American crash investigation team, were all it took to destroy Flight 182.

Mr Turner, head of the cockpit voice recorder unit in Washington, flew to Ireland from Bombay to confer with British accident experts at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough.

He said that from the recordings he had heard “whatever happened on that plane was utterly catastrophic. The 747 is exceptionally strong and even a bomb would not usually destroy it in such a very short space of time.” The crash investigators have analysed all the aircraft’s technical data — the black box, cockpit voice recorder, and the Shannon tape of flight deck conversations. Here, only disagreement seems to reign, with claims and denials of noises and explosion-like bangs. The sea search has brought back to Ireland 131 bodies and three tonnes of debris. Forensic examination has come up only with a negative hypothesis: there is absolutely no evidence of a bomb. The answer may lie 7000 feet down in the Atlantic, 120 miles from the Irish coast, where further large segments of the plane, in-

eluding the tail section, are strewn. But just when a united international effort is called for, dissension seems to be setting in. Under United Nations protocols, the investigation into a crash in international waters is led by the country whose airline was involved. It will cost about $29 million to raise the rest of the wreckage from the seabed, a rocky-sided valley. For a country like India, the cost is inordinate. It would like the other involved nations, and possibly the plane-maker, to share the cost. The nations are the United States where the plane was built, and Canada, where the flight originated and most passengers lived. Boeing says: “Manufacturers traditionally don’t have involvement in the salvage operations. We do have experts on the scene assisting with the identification of

bits of the plane seen on the television screen on the sea bed.”

America and Canada appear ready to pay jointly for the operation. However, they would then wish to control the lifting operation, a caveat which the Indian authorities would find difficult to accept. They would lose some face, and responsibility for a major part of the investigation would pass out of India’s hands.

What is happening in Ireland is being reflected in the clamour which is growing for a review of the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organisation rules to ensure that future crash investigations are handled more swiftly. It has not pleased the aviation world, for instance, that India has denied the other crash investigators copies of the cockpit voice tape and forbade them from taking notes before they returned to Washington. The cockpit recorder reveals that a normal conversation was going on until the “event” which crippled the plane. A member of

the cabin crew can be heard asking the flight engineer to obtain more customs and immigration forms.

Then there is what Western crash investigators have described as a quarter second of muffled noise with a sharp bang a fortieth of a second long. Yet Mr Justice Kirpal, now collecting evidence in Cork, has said: “I have heard the cockpit voice recorder and I have not heard any such crack at all.” By contrast, the flight data recorder (black box) comes to an abrupt halt, suggesting an immediate power failure. The fact that the sound of an explosion reached the voice recorder before the plane’s electrical power system was cut to the black box indicates that a power failure was not the primary cause.

The Royal Aircraft Establishment has also been analysing a sixsecond tape recorded by air traffic

control at Shannon. This contains a human shriek, and there are intermittent signals during those seconds, probably as short circuits sporadically power the transmitter. Mr Turner, one of the world’s leading experts in the field of voice recorders, 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. He is inclined to the view that a bomb did the damage. His reading of the evidence is that the “event” occurred in the first-class passenger cabin at the nose of the aircraft. The nose of a jumbo is vulnerable. A bomb elsewhere should not destroy the plane in a few seconds, but ripping a hole in the nose would open the plane to an air

intake of 720 km and the skin would be torn away. Air India has installed a store closet at this most vulnerable point nearest the nose, where a device could be easily hidden, but other experts point to the lack of blast damage on the fragment of radar dome recovered from the aircraft’s nose. The Indians have encouraged the theory that a bomb was to blame. Sikh extremists are the prime suspects and the device that exploded the same day at Tokyo airport in the baggage hold of a jet from Canada is strong circumstantial evidence. An alternative theory under seri-. ous study is that structural failure started the disaster sequence. Severe corrosion or a design fault could cause an explosive decompression when the plane ripped itself apart as the pressure

dropped. An insurance fraud is an outside possibility and Canadian police are checking the beneficiaries of victims’ life policies. They have received a tip-off in the Vancouver area and are examining the theory that more than one policy was involved. Investigators have even considered the theory that the Air India plane was hit by space debris from the Russian Progress 24 unmanned spacecraft which docked with the Salyut 7 space station. Detailed examination of the sequence of the re-entry of the booster rockets has now dismissed this hypothesis. Experts are no nearer an answer than the day they began to sift the evidence. As a British aviation expert said: “Sabotage is a frontrunner, but not the front-runner.