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Report
stops short of casting blame for crash
3/28/03
By CHUCK SCHULTZ
NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia -- After spending about $40Êmillion and
4 years, Canadian investigators believe the crash of a Swiss
airliner that killed 229 people was caused by sparks from
faulty wiring igniting flammable insulation above the cockpit,
crippling the plane's electrical system.
Flames spread so quickly that pilots had no chance of saving
the decade-old aircraft before it plunged into the chilly
Atlantic Ocean about six miles south of Peggy's Cove,
concluded a 338-page report released Thursday by the
Transportation Safety Board of Canada. It stopped short of
blaming any single factor for the deadly fire on Sept. 2,
1998, that brought down Swissair Flight 111 within an hour
after the plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, took off for
Switzerland from New York.
However, the report strongly suggests a hastily installed
entertainment system available to some passengers was probably
at least partly to blame for starting the fire, perhaps by
overloading the aircraft's inadequate electrical wiring.
Santa Barbara Aerospace, under authority designated by the
Federal Aviation Administration, was responsible for
certifying that the interactive entertainment system had been
installed according to FAA safety standards. The company, once
among the South Coast's largest employers, moved its
operations from Goleta to San Bernardino about three months
after Flight 111 crashed, then declared bankruptcy and went
out of business in 1999.
Designed by Interactive Flight Technologies of Phoenix, the
pioneering gaming system was put into the ill-fated plane and
about a dozen other Swissair MD-11s by SR Technics of Zurich,
Switzerland, in 1997 and 1998. The add-on electronics were
integrated into the airplanes' wiring system by Hollingsead
International. Computer components and touch-screens,
installed at each seat in the first-class and business
sections of those planes, enabled passengers to watch
pay-per-view movies, shop online, play video games and even
gamble electronically.
The Flight 111 investigation was the most extensive into an
air disaster ever in Canadian history. About 2 million pieces
of the shattered aircraft were retrieved, some as small as a
silver dollar, and 150 miles of electrical wire inspected.
Wire damage believed to be part of the initial ignition was
found on one of the wires that supplied power to the in-flight
entertainment network. However, "it's important to emphasize
here that it is unlikely that this entertainment system power
supply wire was the only wire involved" in the ignition, the
chief investigator, Vic Gerden, cautioned at a news conference
Thursday morning.
"We strongly suspect," he added, "that at least one other wire
was involved, either an aircraft wire, or another
entertainment system wire."
Mr. Gerden stressed the accident would never have happened had
it not been for insulation blankets made out of metalized
polyethylene terephthalate (MPET), which he said were "readily
ignitable" from sparks created by power passing through bad
wiring.
"Without the presence of this and other flammable material,
this accident would not have happened," he said.
Since the crash, the FAA has ordered that the metalized
insulation blankets be removed from all aircraft registered in
the United States, but given the airlines up to four years to
do so...
Swissair, which is now bankrupt, removed the interactive
gaming system from all its aircraft soon after the crash.
Santa Barbara Aerospace spokesmen could not be reached for
comment, but an attorney handling lawsuits against the
now-defunct company has strongly denied that the crash
resulted from the entertainment system, or Santa Barbara
Aerospace's actions in certifying its design and installation.
"Factually, Santa Barbara Aerospace has nothing to do with the
(midair electrical) failure, nor does the entertainment
system," insisted Martin Rose, a partner in the Rose-Walker
law firm of Dallas, Texas.
"Whatever started that fire wasn't the entertainment system,"
he added during phone interviews with the News-Press last
month. "The (FAA) testing found nothing in that system's
design or installation that could result in a safety issue."
Many family members of the victims have said they believe the
gaming system was at fault for the crash, and that U.S.
regulators should never have sanctioned it.
The voluminous and highly technical report made nine safety
recommendations involving testing for insulation materials and
electrical systems, and improving the flight cockpit and data
recording system. Canadian investigators previously made 14
recommendations that led to the removal of flammable
insulation material from aircraft and improved fire reaction
measures for pilots.
Relatives of passengers killed in the crash said the FAA and
other regulators should implement the remaining
recommendations immediately.
"There are problems, serious problems, with the wiring of
aircraft," said Miles Gerety of Redding, Conn., whose brother,
Pierce, was killed. "I wonder if the FAA will make the
airlines spend the money."
from
this link
You
probably haven't yet noticed it, because it's a
subliminal ploy designed to influence the average
reader's subconscious. A common thread that runs through
many of these post Final Report media articles is the
misrepresentation of arcing as a unique phenomenon by
referring to it as sparking (or more commonly as "a
spark"). It's a pity because that imparts a completely
incorrect picture/image and does not convey the concept
of arcing as a destructively explosive process at all.
No need to wonder whether it's been done purposefully.
It's obvious that since the TSB were unable to "involve"
Kapton conclusively in the initiating event, that the
FAA/ATA and Boeing coterie of lawyers insisted that any
such inferences be removed from the "corrected" Draft
Report. The TSB's claim that "if it hadn't been for
the MPET, the accident wouldn't have happened" is
also hard to swallow. An explosive arc-tracking event
running along a wire-bundle (particularly a vertical
one) can incapacitate whole systems in a cascading
series of failures that can overwhelm the pilots and
affect the aircraft's controlability.
A well-orchestrated low-keying of the WEBCAST public
presentation has now taken the pressure off dangerous
wiring insulation. But I don't think we've heard the
last of aromatic polyimides. There's too much of the
stuff around not to have it rear up and bite again. As
it ages, it dries out, embrittles, loses top-coat via
flaking, micro-cracks and soaks up moisture
hygroscopically. Its potential lethality isn't cured by
removing the MPET blankets - but that isn't going to
happen anyway, not for a few more years. More than any
other threat its message continues to be: "Watch this
space. I'll be back". |
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