News - Human error may have caused Dana plane crash

[TGD]

 THE Dana Air crash, which left over 153 persons dead last year in Lagos, may have been caused by the pilot's failure to turn on certain fuel pumps or valves, according to the Associated Press (AP).

The McDonnell Douglas MD-83, operated by Nigeria's Dana Air, lost power from both engines while approaching the airport in Lagos last June and slammed into an apartment building, killing at least six more people on the ground. A United States (U.S.)-Nigerian preliminary investigation is said to fault the pilots.

It was Nigeria's first fatal commercial airline accident in six years and resulted in significant economic and political fallout, spurring something like a bill collectors' run on the nation's airlines: Contractors, airports and government agencies stopped servicing Nigerian airlines until they honoured years-overdue invoices, while unpaid pilots demanded back pay.

An official accident report has not been released. The investigation's tentative conclusions have not been reported and could still be revised, the people familiar with the probe cautioned. The Commissioner of Nigeria's Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), Muhtar Usman, said he had not yet heard about results from the U.S. forensic labs.

By ending the mystery surrounding the crash, the findings stand to return a sense of normalcy to Nigeria's booming but dysfunctional air travel industry, analysts say.

"We have nothing to hide," Dana spokesman, Tony Usidamen, said but declined to comment on the crash's cause until the report is completed. "We hope that the government will take the decision to make the report public. It may or may not affect how the average traveller views the industry."

The most likely cause of the accident was the crew's failure to properly monitor fuel flow and turn on certain fuel pumps, according to industry and government safety experts familiar with the investigation. That would result in both engines shutting down almost simultaneously from lack of fuel.

No other significant problem was discovered with the engines or other aircraft systems, these people said, and the 22-year old plane had plenty of fuel onboard to reach the airport. Partly fed by that fuel, the crash sparked an intense fire that raged for nearly a day and compromised the flight-data recorder.

So investigators had less data to rely on than is usual in modern jetliner crashes and they are still working on the final wording of the report. The preliminary focus on pilot error could be toned down, according to two people familiar with the details.

The cockpit voice recorder, which survived intact, showed that the pilots spent the last 25 seconds unsuccessfully trying to restart the engines. A preliminary report issued last year by the AIB did not say why the engines shut down.

Some pilots and safety experts said that crews flying MD-80 series jets need to pay close attention to turning on certain booster pumps and ensuring that valves controlling fuel flow from various tanks are in the proper position, because mistakes can result in one or both engines ending up starved of fuel. According to one Nigerian official with knowledge of the situation, "this is purely a case of human error."

A spokeswoman for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which is helping in the investigation, declined to comment. The NTSB typically is asked to help local investigators when a U.S.-made plane is involved in a major accident.

Nigerian investigators have called the crash one of the most bewildering in recent aviation history. They spent last June and July focused on the possibility that bad fuel, or even an obstruction as simple as a stray rag in the fuel tank, might have caused two engines to fail nearly simultaneously.

"The fuel supply in Nigeria has been probably audited a dozen times in the past couple weeks," an industry official involved in the fuel review said in June. "People are kicking around obscure scenarios at this point."

When the engines initially stopped running, according to one person familiar with the probe, the pilots pushed the controls to maximum thrust but the engines did not react. The preliminary report said the crew radioed an emergency distress call to controllers, reporting a "dual engine failure" and "negative response from throttle."

The crash brought an end to six unexpectedly encouraging years in Nigerian aviation, during which the country recorded no fatal commercial airline crashes. Before that time, the country, Africa's most populous, had been a byword for air disasters. A raft of new regulations, however, had turned Nigeria into a nascent success story.



The Guardian