Families hear gripping details of final moments on doomed plane


By KEVIN COX
Friday, March 28, 2003 - Page A16


WEST DOVER, N.S. -- Ian Shaw was struggling yesterday to deal with the details of the last minutes of his daughter Stephanie's life on the doomed Swissair jet more than four years ago.

As Transportation Safety Board officials outlined their version of events that led to Flight 111 plummeting through the darkness and killing all 229 people on board, Mr. Shaw learned for the first time that although the crew knew the plane was in trouble, the passengers learned of the emergency less than 10 minutes before smashing into the waters of St. Margarets Bay.

He said it is difficult to imagine what the final minutes on the aircraft would have been like.

"The crew and the passengers were condemned. They knew there was no way out. The fact that they knew of their condemnation in the case of the crew for a number of minutes and in the case of the passengers less than that is small comfort."

He said the flight crew, who were criticized in some initial reports for not trying to immediately land the plane when smoke was detected, should be commended for their actions.

"Most of the report is related to mechanics but this aspect deals with the human responses of those men who perhaps imagined it was a benign circumstance inside the air conditioning," Mr. Shaw said.

"They gradually became aware it was something more and then flew for two minutes or more in a cabin filled with smoke with the ceiling on fire and dropping into the place where they were trying to control something that was beyond human control," he said.

Mr. Shaw, who moved to Nova Scotia from Switzerland after his 24-year-old daughter's death, and many other relatives and friends of crash victims on hand yesterday, knew the 338-page report would focus on technical issues, but it was the 11 pages dealing with the crew's attempts to deal with the last 21 minutes of the flight that became the most gripping.

According to the report, pilot Urs Zimmerman and co-pilot Stephen Loew detected smoke in the cockpit at 10:12 p.m., and 30 seconds later the passengers were told to fasten their seat belts because of light turbulence.

About eight minutes later the pilot told the passengers that they would be making an emergency landing.

But as the smoke thickened and the heat in the cockpit intensified, the crew struggled to locate the source of the fire as they dumped fuel and headed for the Halifax airport about 40 kilometres to the east.

At 10:24 p.m., Mr. Zimmerman called air traffic control at Moncton and declared an emergency. Flight attendants went through the cabin with flashlights preparing for the emergency landing. The cockpit voice recorder stopped working a minute later.

Margie Topf of Boston, whose sister Nancy was en route to Geneva to teach dancing when the crash occurred, was grateful to learn her sister died instantly.

"I wanted to know how she suffered before landing . . . I didn't know whether she died from the sharp descent or fire or impact and that was clear to me that she was killed on impact," the Boston woman said.

But the report will not fill the numb emptiness and anger felt by some relatives who say the bankruptcy of Swissair, and the demise of the companies that made and installed the controversial entertainment system, leaves no one to account for the tragedy.

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