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Herald file
Ian Shaw hopes report blames plane's entertainment system.
MORE on the report in Metro section

Herald file
Swissair passenger Stephanie Shaw was 'a darling.'


Swissair report likely to be painful
Father of crash victim suspects entertainment system as cause
By Lois Legge / Staff Reporter

Ian Shaw isn't looking forward to Thursday. It's been 4 1/2 years since his daughter Stephanie and 228 others died in one of Canada's worst air disasters.

Like hundreds of other relatives, Shaw still wants to know why. But he doesn't expect to get all the answers. And the final report into the crash of Swissair Flight 111 off Nova Scotia on Sept. 2, 1998, will bring up the pain he's tried so hard to bury.

"It means dredging back up again . . . all of the distress that we the family have known over the past five years, and it means a final closing of a particular chapter," Shaw said.

"It will be very difficult, I think."

The former resident of Geneva, Switzerland, has lived in West Dover, outside Halifax, since the first anniversary of the crash.

Some families have already expressed fears that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada's final report, being released Thursday in Halifax, won't isolate the cause of the crash or focus enough on the plane's inflight entertainment system.

They believe the entertainment system is a key suspect in light of a year-long investigation by the USA Today newspaper that found numerous technical and installation flaws in the system.

Shaw, too, believes the entertainment system sparked the chain of events that downed the Boeing MD-11 and shattered it into two million pieces in St. Margarets Bay while it was on its way to Geneva from New York.

"My personal conviction," Shaw said, "is that the entertainment system, which Swissair immediately took off all of their flights after the accident, was most probably the cause of the overheating of the wiring."

Investigators found burnt wiring from that system - which allowed passengers to watch movies or play music or video games - and scorched remnants of the jet's general wiring.

But Shaw doubts the safety board will pinpoint just one cause, although he says he's satisfied with the investigation.

"I would almost prefer that (the entertainment system) be given the same weight as other items," he said, "because obviously the irony of something so trivial having caused the end of those lives is something particularly difficult to bear."

Board spokesman Jim Harris says the report will detail a series of events that led to the crash. But it remains unclear whether the report will identify what initially sparked smoke in the cockpit 16 minutes before the plane went down and led to the subsequent electrical failure on board.

"There's never, ever a single item that leads to an accident."

But, he added, "When you read the report, it's very complete.

"You'll see that there's a chain of events that occurred that led up to this accident and it's quite specific."

Miles Gerety, head of an American families association, says he understands that some crashes can never be completely understood, especially with so little of the plane left intact.

But Gerety, a Connecticut man whose brother Pierce died in the crash, still hopes the report pinpoints a central cause.

Gerety and others will be in Halifax for the report's release but he doesn't expect a large number of family members to attend because the board plans family briefings in Geneva, Paris, New York and Los Angeles after Thursday. People may also limit their travelling because of the war in Iraq, Gerety says.

While family members have the most at stake, countless Nova Scotians who helped after the tragedy are also keenly interested in the report.

John Campbell is one of them.

The co-owner of the Sou'Wester restaurant in Peggys Cove was one of the first at the crash site. Campbell and others took his whale-watching tour boat to the scene and found a field of debris and carnage.

In the following days, Campbell helped tend to the hundreds of reporters, RCMP officers, family members, firefighters, Red Cross workers and others who gathered at the restaurant, a sort of makeshift base.

"I would like to see the report," said Campbell, who has also taken families to the crash site on the anniversaries.

"I would think the impact could be huge" for airline safety, he said.

Dr. John Butt, the former Nova Scotia medical examiner in charge of identifying and "reuniting" the human remains, still thinks about the disaster all the time. But there's one box he can't bring himself to open.

It holds many cards and letters from victims' families, newspaper clippings and mementoes, like the paper airplane with a diver drawn on it, made by a boy whose father died in the crash.

"I'm just not ready to look into the depths of these memories," said Butt, now running a consulting business in Vancouver.

When he thinks about the aftermath of the crash, he prefers to ponder how Nova Scotia professionals and volunteers pulled together to help.

He says the disaster brought home to him the "goodness of people" and gave him back some of the compassion he'd lost while practising pathology.

"I think it made me a better person," he said.

But it's remembering people's compassion that still brings Butt to tears. He mentions being part of a motorcade going to a memorial service at Peggys Cove.

"I saw these tributes - children's drawings, ribbons in trees, floral tributes on the highway, blessings for families," he said, as his voice cracked. "It was unique. That's Nova Scotia."

Ian Shaw has felt some of that comfort here, even though he calls the death of his daughter an "amputation" from his once "perfect" family.

The 64-year-old runs a restaurant in West Dover while his wife, whom he talks to daily, and his son have chosen to stay in Geneva.

Living in Nova Scotia has helped him "let go" of most of his grief and suppress thoughts of what happened to 24-year-old Stephanie. He last saw the political science student at the Geneva airport as he sent her off on a brief trip to New York to visit her boyfriend.

"I came home and said to my wife, I've never seen Stephanie look so radiant, and she had golden hair and the sun was in it and . . . gold light (shined) through it," he recalled.

"She was a very pretty girl and a constant source of friendship . . . to her parents and to her brother and then to everybody whose path crossed hers.

"She was a darling."


http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2003/03/24/f151.raw.html