Investigators implicate entertainment system wiring in Swissair crash

By ALISON AULD


In his progress report, Vic Gerden, lead investigator into the crash of Swissair Flight 111 off Peggy's Cove, N.S., Sept. 2, 1998, said work has almost ended in hangar at Shearwater, N.S., where a nine-metre front section of the plane has been reconstructed from wreckage. (CPArchive/Andrew Vaughan)
HALIFAX (CP) - Wiring that fed a controversial entertainment system aboard Swissair Flight 111 likely contributed to a fire that brought the plane down off Nova Scotia in 1998, investigators said Thursday.

The Transportation Safety Board didn't identify the exact source of a fire that led to a massive electrical failure aboard the MD-11 jetliner, but concluded it was linked to the system.

In a 337-page report, the agency said the fire started when wire arced above the ceiling on the right side of the cockpit. The arcing - a phenomenon in which a wire's coating is corroded and can lead to sparking - ignited a flammable insulation covering, allowing the fire to race through the plane's wiring system.

"Investigators believe that this arcing event on the entertainment system wire was associated with the initial arcing event," the agency said in a release.

"However, investigators could not pinpoint this as the lead event."


The board said it had recovered 20 pieces of wire from the shattered remains of the plane that showed melted copper, indicative of arcing damage.

Vic Gerden, the agency's lead investigator, said this was likely not the only wire involved in the arcing.

"We strongly suspect that at least one other wire was involved, either an aircraft wire or another entertainment system wire," he said in a statement.

Investigators also determined the pilots acted appropriately in not trying to land the plane immediately, something critics have argued would have saved some or all of the 229 people who died in the crash.

The pilots spent valuable minutes trying to identify the source of the fire after smelling smoke 53 minutes into the flight. They diverted away from the Halifax airport to dump fuel over the ocean after having a near full load since leaving New York for the transatlantic trip.

The board did a theoretical "descent profile" and found the pilots would "not have been able to complete a safe landing in Halifax, even if they had undertaken to do so at the time of the PAN PAN urgency radio communication," the report says.

The agency, which has spent $60 million and 4� years examining millions of pieces of wreckage in the case, issued nine new recommendations. Two address testing and flammability standards of thermal acoustic insulation materials.

It also recommended improved certification standards for planes' add-on systems, such as the entertainment system.

Four recommendations propose improvements to how information from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders is captured and stored.

Some aviation experts believe the entertainment unit is key to the fire. Critics have said the system was so hastily installed on the MD-11 that the proper inspections weren't done to ensure it could operate safely in the air.

One avionics expert called it a "power-hungry monster" that demanded an excessive amount of energy. Critics have blamed the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in part for allegedly shirking its duties in certifying the system - something they said the safety board should have addressed in its report.

The system, which allowed passengers to gamble, play video games and watch movies, was found on test flights to raise cabin temperatures and cause hard drives in the seats to fail.

The board has released several recommendations and advisories over the course of the investigation. They have included calls for more stringent testing of electrical wiring in aircraft, inspection of cockpit wiring of all MD-11s and independent power sources for flight recorders.

In 1999, after investigators determined that metallized Mylar insulation on the plane helped to spread the fire, the FAA ordered U.S.-registered airplanes to replace the material within four years.

"It is important to emphasize here that without the presence of this and other flammable material, this accident would not have happened," Gerden said.

http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2003/03/23/49534-cp.html

What the TSB fails to say is that the IFEN shouldn't have been on the aircraft in the first place. At least I haven't heard that from them. Maybe it's in the lengthy actual final report.

I do want to commend them however on a thorough investigation.

Interesting that they would say that the installation would not have anything to do with it. Makes absolutely no sense to me. The reporter from the Globe and Mail is trying to make some sense of this (he's RIGHT) and Gerden is hedging. Just ridiculous.

Anyone else getting the feeling that Gerden is trying too hard NOT to blame the IFEN? Even the FAA said it didn't belong on that aircraft. Strange...