IHT: Swiss open formal inquiry into ex-Crossair executives

	Swiss open formal inquiry into ex-Crossair executives
	Fiona Fleck The New York Times	Saturday, March 13, 2004

GENEVA The former chief executive of Swiss International Airlines, André Dosé, is under criminal investigation on suspicion of negligent manslaughter in connection with a November 2001 Crossair plane crash near Zurich that killed 24 people, Swiss prosecutors said Friday.

The Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office said in a statement that it was also investigating the head of Switzerland's Federal Office for Civil Aviation as well as the operations chief and chief trainer at Crossair.

Swiss prosecutors did not identify any of the targets of their investigation by name. But at the time of the crash, André Auer was head of the Federal Office for Civil Aviation and Thomas Brandt was the operations chief at Crossair.

Few if any airline chief executives in Europe have faced criminal prosecution for failing to maintain adequate safety standards, aviation analysts say, but that is a prospect Dosé could face although no charges have been filed against him or any of the other individuals.

The investigation was based in part on an accident report completed by the Swiss government.

Dosé, 46, who started the new airline Swiss in March 2002, said that it came as no surprise to him to find himself at the heart of the investigation and denied all wrongdoing.

"The accident on 24 November 2001 came as the worst moment of the three years I spent at the top of Crossair and Swiss," he said in a statement.

"As the CEO of the former Crossair, I always behaved in full accordance with my responsibility to aviation law, that is why I welcome the current investigation by the Federal Prosecutor's Office. "I am convinced that it will not find me guilty of the tragic accident," Dosé said.

Prosecutors are expected to consider whether Crossair's safety standards, which Dosé helped to develop during his career at the former airline, matched international aviation safety standards. They are also likely to look at whether Crossair's internal safety standards were adhered to by staff and managers.

The RJ-100 Jumbolino came down near Zurich airport on the night of Nov. 24, 2001, as the pilot sought to negotiate a difficult landing route over wooded hills that was used at night to prevent noise.

A significant backdrop to the investigation is the final report last year of the Swiss Aircraft Investigation Bureau. It concluded that the 57-year-old pilot of Crossair flight CRX 3579 was overtired and flying too low.

The report also pointed to the existence of cultural and safety problems at Crossair, and noted that neither the airline nor the regulator, the Federal Office for Civil Aviation appeared to know of them, or failed to remedy them. The bureau had expressed particular concern that the pilot of the plane had been approved for promotion from a turboprop aircraft to a more technologically advanced aircraft after repeatedly failing earlier tests to fly a larger plane, the twin-jet MD-80.

The bureau said that "a certain aversion to more complex technical systems runs like a thread through the commander's career."

Airline officials who approved the pilot's promotion to the larger aircraft apparently were not told of the earlier promotion failures.

Earlier in his career, the pilot failed his professional pilots license test three times before finally passing.

He also had been involved in a number of serious incidents, including one in which he pulled up the landing gear of a turboprop Saab 340 while the aircraft was on the ground, destroying it. In one of several flying incidents, he descended below the clouds on a sightseeing trip to land at what he thought was a Swiss airport, only to see that he was actually in Italy. Passengers could clearly see Italian road signs before the plane pulled back up into the clouds and headed for Switzerland.

The bureau said that Crossair had a checkered series of safety cultures, depending on the aircraft involved. Crews of the Saab 340 were prone to operate "with less conformity to the regulations" than pilots of larger aircraft, the bureau's report said.

The bureau said it had identified 40 cases of nonconformity with the rules between 1996 and 2001, most of which were concealed from management.

Neither the airline nor the Swiss regulators seemed to know of the problems that permeated the carrier's culture, the bureau said, and although the commanding pilot obviously had problems, "the responsibles of the airline either did not recognize these problems or they did not react appropriately to them."

For example, the bureau noted that the commanding pilot had violated Swiss legal limits on maximum flying time for two days before the crash, meaning that he was likely fatigued as he deliberately continued a questionable approach to Zurich in poor weather.

He had flown 15 hours and 31 minutes the day before the crash - an hour and 31 minutes longer than allowed - because he was "free-lancing" as an instructor at a flight school before he went to work for the airline.

It was both his and airline management's responsibility to see that free-lance activities do not result in violations of regulations, the bureau said.

Accident investigators also criticized a lack of safety controls and poor pilot training at Crossair, and accused senior managers of failing to realize that the pilot - who was killed along with his co-pilot - was unfit to fly.

The Swiss regulator, FOCA, did not do a proper job of supervising Crossair, the bureau also said. The agency was hampered by personnel shortages at the time. "Up to the time of the accident, Crossair was never the subject of an operational audit by the FOCA," the report said.

The announcement Friday came after weeks of intense media speculation that Dosé, who resigned this week as chief executive of Swiss International Airlines, or Swiss, which was formed out of Crossair, would find himself at the center of the investigation.

Priska Spoerri, a spokeswoman for Swiss, said Dosé's former operations chief, Brandt at Crossair, was still employed by the company, but he took a sabbatical in November when the company was restructured.

Swiss did not name Crossair's former chief trainer for privacy reasons.

Spoerri said he had been suspended from his job as a pilot with Swiss for safety reasons, because he was "in shock" to find himself targeted by the inquiry.

The former chief trainer would continue to train pilots at Swiss, Spoerri said.

None of the three past and present Swiss managers had been informed by prosecutors they were under investigation and first heard the news from the media, Spoerri said.

The Swiss investigation also targets Auer, who resigned as head of Switzerland's Federal Office for Civil Aviation in August last year after a report by a Dutch aviation institute told the Swiss to improve air safety following a series of aviation accidents.

The criminal inquiry into the crash opened after Swiss accident investigators released their final report on the crash in early February.

Prosecutors identified the four after a "considerable number of documents were examined, intensive investigations carried out and several witness statements made."

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