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When Canadian investigators disclose later this month (on 27 March)
what they believe caused a September 1998 airliner crash off Nova
Scotia, renewed attention may focus on Santa Barbara Aerospace, a
now defunct aircraft-refurbishing firm once among this area's
biggest employers.
About an hour after Swissair Flight 111 left New York bound for
Geneva, an electrical fire between the cockpit and cabin disabled
the MD-11 jet. It plunged into the chilly Atlantic Ocean six miles
south of Peggy's Cove, killing all 215 passengers and 14 crew
members aboard. The force of hitting the water from as high as
10,000 feet shattered the
decade-old plane into approximately 2
million pieces, some of which sank 190 feet to the ocean floor. Over
the 18 months that followed, salvage crews aided by thousands of
military personnel and equipment managed to recover about 98 percent
of the wreckage, officials said.In what has been the longest and
most expensive investigation ever conducted by the Transportation
Safety Board of Canada -- costing an estimate $50 million over the 4
1/2 years -- experts laboriously examined and reconstructed key
pieces of the plane ranging from silver dollar-sized scraps to
16-foot-long chunks of fuselage. A report due to be released on
March 27 will publicly announce the board's findings on the likely
causes of the crash, and presumably answer questions that quickly
emerged on whether electrical shorts related to a unique
entertainment system on board the plane sparked Flight 111's tragic
end. 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. Whether or not shoddy design and installation
of the pioneering entertainment system helped bring Flight 111 down,
speculation over that as a factor in the crash definitely
contributed to the speedy financial collapse of Santa Barbara
Aerospace, said Martin Rose, a partner in the Rose-Walker law firm
of Dallas. "The rumors swirling about this definitely hurt their
business, when, in fact, they didn't do anything wrong. The bad
publicity early on, from speculation, hurt Santa Barbara Aerospace's
business a lot." In any case, the once flourishing company -- which
had operated since 1994 from leased space in a Santa Barbara
Municipal Airport hangar now owned by Ampersand Holdings Inc. --
left town about three months after the crash. It relocated to San
Bernardino, declared bankruptcy there in the spring of 1999 and
ceased business altogether later that year. At its peak, the company
employed several hundred people locally.
The entertainment system, meanwhile, was designed by Interactive
Flight Technologies of Phoenix, and the system was put into the
Flight 111 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. The pioneering system's 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. Jim Harris, a spokesman for
the Canadian safety agency, said the pending TSB report "will get
close" to pinning down what caused the fire that brought down Flight
111, but he declined to be more specific. "There's usually no such
thing as a single cause of an (airline) accident," he cautioned. "A
multiplicity of things are almost always contributing factors. I
have yet to see a single accident that had one cause."
According to
a story published last fall in a Swiss newspaper, and a lengthy USA
Today investigative piece last month, an early draft of the safety
board's report concluded the fire was at least partly due to
problems with the computerized entertainment system. "That was
speculative story from Switzerland," responded Mr. Harris. "I think
you'll have to wait for the (final) report to come out. "He also
would not comment on a portion of the Feb. 17 article by USA Today
reporter Gary Stoller that read, "the Canadian government has
considered the system's electronics as a possible source of an
electrical fire that may have caused the crash. "The entertainment
system quickly came under suspicion after investigators found dozens
of short-circuited wires in the wreckage, several from that system.
Investigators have yet to say whether they think those wires shorted
due to heat from the fire or, in fact, sparked it. Their exhaustive
inquiry has also turned up other possible factors, including
airplane insulation blankets made from materials deemed too
flammable, and a potentially dangerous type of insulation known as
Kapton covering miles of wiring inside that plane and many other
commercial airliners. Experts say laboratory tests have shown Kapton
can sometimes burst into flames if the coating cracks or wears
through, resulting in an electrical short. Mr. Stoller's story
asserted Santa Barbara Aerospace hadn't followed mandated procedures
or properly completed all the required paperwork before certifying
that the entertainment system installed on the MD-11s met FAA safety
standards. It cited the Swissair case as a glaring example of "a
flawed regulatory system" in which the FAA had increasingly
delegated its authority for inspecting airplane modifications to
dozens of private companies like SBA. "We don't know what caused the
crash," Mr. Stoller told the News-Press during a recent phone
interview. "We're waiting for the Canadian government to say.
"However, after spending what he said was more than a year reviewing
thousands of pages of official documents and interviewing hundreds
of people about the crash, "there's no question in my mind that
(SBA) bore responsibility for improper certification of an
interactive entertainment system," the reporter added. "My biggest
concern," Mr. Stoller remarked, "is the way the FAA oversees its
designee system and farms out so many of its duties" for ensuring
the safety of airline renovations. The FAA refused to comment on
those accusations. "Generally we're not responding to Mr. Stoller's
story in USA Today," said Alison Duquette, an FAA spokeswoman in
Washington, D.C. "That story asserts or suggests a cause for the
accident and, of course, the TSB has not made that determination or
issued their final report. The experts haven't come out with their
findings yet. "The suggestion that the crash had anything to do with
the entertainment system, or SBA's actions in certifying its design
and installation, was strongly disputed by an attorney handling all
related lawsuits against the company. "Factually, Santa Barbara
Aerospace has nothing to do with the (midair electrical) failure,
nor does the entertainment system," said Mr. Rose. "Whatever started
that fire wasn't the entertainment system," he added. "The (FAA)
testing found nothing in that system's design or installation that
could result in a safety issue. "That seems to square with findings
of a Special Certification Review Team, as disclosed by the FAA in
June 1999.Even during "fault testing," under conditions more severe
than ones likely to occur in flight, "no abnormal operational
features" were noted in the entertainment system or "its affect on
other airplane systems," the FAA report states. "Neither the IFEN
(entertainment) system components nor wiring produced conditions
that could be considered unsafe when exposed to the types of faults
that could be
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| The Inflight
Passenger Entertainment Systems are sucking up a lot of juice |
encountered during airplane operation. "Yet, three
months after issuing that report, the federal agency banned
installation of the IFEN system on all MD-11 airplanes registered in
the U.S. Even though a two-month investigation turned up no problems
with the wiring or installation, FAA investigators concluded that
system's electrical power switching was not compatible with the
design of the MD-11. Specifically, extra steps required to turn off
power to the entertainment system could limit "the flight crew's
ability to respond to a smoke or fumes emergency," the FAA noted in
a Sept. 29, 1999, statement announcing the ban. Mr. Rose has a
different take on why the agency banned the entertainment system
after finding no abnormalities. "How many letters are there in the
word "Politics?'" he sarcastically remarked. The ban, he said, "was
sort of a nice little piece of public relations that was
meaningless. "The only U.S. planes that had such systems were a
handful of MD-11s and Swissair had voluntarily disconnected all of
those units soon after Flight 111 crashed. "The IFEN is not
currently installed on any U.S. airplane and is deactivated on
Swissair craft," the FAA acknowledged in its announcement.
In recent
years, a variety of different interactive entertainment systems have
become commonplace on commercial airlines, but none with the same
design as those on the ill-fated MD-11."The FAA has since taken a
number of actions to ensure previous and future IFE (in-flight
entertainment) systems do not have the same design features as those
on the accident plane," according to Ms. Duquette. Mr. Rose is
representing SBA's insurers in defending it against lawsuits
stemming from the crash. Swissair and Boeing, the parent company of
MD-11's manufacturer, early on assumed all liability for the crash,
in response to dozens of lawsuits from victims' relatives and other
parties. To date, those two companies -- Swissair went bankrupt but
later re-emerged as an airline company called Swiss -- have paid out
hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements related to Flight
111, according to Mr. Rose."A lot of people suspect the final
numbers (total settlements) will be between $300 million and $400
million," he said.In the wake of those payouts, insurance companies
for Boeing and Swissair are in turn suing SBA and several other
companies, Mr. Rose added. "They're looking to get some of their
money back. "He insists the FAA report in 1999 exonerated SBA of any
wrongdoing or responsibility for the crash. However, Mr. Stoller of
USA Today contends that investigation turned up serious problems
with the project's certification process. For years before that,
too, "the FAA was aware of repeated problems at SBA," he
wrote.
Government documents show, he said, that the company was cited
in March 1995 for "performing, supervising and inspecting work with
inadequate personnel. "In March 1996, officials found that SBA
wasn't completing inspections reports, as required by FAA safety
rules, the USA Today story added. In December 1996, SBA's operating
certificate from the FAA was briefly suspended, just as the company
began certifying the installation of the entertainment systems on
the Swissair MD-11s. The license was reinstated within days, though,
with an FAA lawyer explaining it had been suspended "by mistake."
"It doesn't add up," Mr. Stoller observed. "When they (FAA
officials) pull a company's certificate, a lot of thought is put
into it. Why was SBA's operating certificate quickly given back and
did they say, 'Oops, we made a mistake!'" he wondered aloud. In an
unrelated case, the FAA fined the local company $300,000 in
mid-1998, about three months before Flight 111 crashed, for
illegally shipping hazardous materials. In April 1997, SBA had put a
shipment of seven, metal oxygen generators with plastic safety caps
on a commercial flight to Houston, Texas. Such generators, used to
provide oxygen if a plane losses cabin pressure, were banned from
airline cargo holds by the FAA after ones being transported on a
ValuJet plane burst into flames, causing a May 1996 crash that
killed 110 people in the Florida Everglades.
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