Friday, February 28, 2003 Back The Halifax Herald Limited

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Final Swissair report coming March 27

By Chad Lucas / Staff Reporter

A final report on what caused Swissair Flight 111 to crash near Peggys Cove 4 1/2 years ago will be made public next month.

The Canadian Transportation Safety Board will release the report in Halifax on March 27.

Flight 111 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean en route from New York to Geneva on Sept. 2, 1998, killing all 229 people on board. Pilots reported smoke in the MD-11 jet's cockpit 53 minutes into the trip, and the electrical systems began failing 15 minutes later.

Safety board spokesman Jim Harris said Thursday he hasn't seen a final copy of the report, but it's likely it will give a number of causes and contributing factors in the crash.

"I've yet to see a report that has a single cause," he said.

The exhaustive investigation has cost more than $50 million. It took recovery crews almost 15 months to collect two million pieces of wreckage from the ocean. Crews eventually salvaged 98 per cent of the aircraft by weight.

Myles Gerety, who lost his brother Pierce in the crash, said many victims' families are expecting to hear that the aircraft's onboard entertainment system was the likely cause of the disaster.

The system was identified early in the investigation as a possible cause of the electrical failure that led to a loss of control of the jet.

"The betting is that that's probably a cause, which is completely ironic and horrible," Mr. Gerety said from Bridgeport, Conn.

"It just seems like a total, stupid waste. If it is the entertainment system, I'm going to be really upset."

A year-long investigative report published earlier this month in USA Today documents the entertainment system's spotty history, including rushed installations, missing certification documents and a litany of technical problems.

Both Swissair and another airline that tested the systems complained they overheated and caused the hard disk drives to fail, the newspaper reported.

After the crash, Swissair disconnected the entertainment systems on its other jets. The Federal Aviation Authority later banned the systems.

Mark Fetherolf said he's convinced the video systems played a key role in the crash. He's concerned the board's report will not be hard enough on their maker and installer.

"I think we're in a situation where their actions . . . go well beyond benign negligence," said Mr. Fetherolf, whose 16-year-old daughter, Tara, died in the crash. "I suspect they knew what they were doing, and that what they were doing was creating a hazard."

The Transportation Safety Board has released several recommendations and advisories over the past four years as their probe has progressed. They have included calls for more stringent testing of electrical wiring used in aircraft, inspection of cockpit wiring on 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 airlines to replace the material within four years.

Mr. Fetherolf said he plans to travel from his Palm Beach, Fla., home to Halifax for the report's release. But he doesn't expect it to give him any sense of closure.

"To say it's the ultimate, final truth would be naive," he said. "It's a road we'll still be on for a long time."


http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2003/02/28/pNovaScotia137.raw.html

Mark and I still believe the families that lost loved ones on sr111 should be able to see the draft report and we continue to try to achieve that goal despite the TSB's recent rejections of our requests for that information. We should also have been allowed to comment. We are afraid that the final report will water down the information in the draft report particularly regarding the findings about the entertainment system. We would like to see a criminal investigation lodged against those involved in this system because we feel there is enough information surrounding the financing and installation of this system to merit one. 229 human beings dead IMO due to greed. Let's not allow that to be lost in a laundry list of causes presented by the CTSB. I think the words of Bouchard in '99 are very alarming and am not surprised at what Vic Gerden has to say about the Final Report. Just look at their thinking regarding the crash of sr111:

http://www.ntsb.gov/events/symp%5Frec/proceedings/May_4/transcript_bouchard.htm

In their efforts to make sure that manufacturers will correct the myriad of problems that showed up as a result of their investigation of the sr111 jet, let's hope they haven't sacrificed the truth by changing the emphasis of their findings.