PEGGY’S COVE — The question of what caused Swissair Flight 111 to crash off the coast of Peggy’s Cove September 2 killing all 215 passengers and 14 crew members on board won’t be answered any time soon.

Investigators spent last week recovering debris and human remains from the disaster, frequently hampered by the weather. Divers continued to hone in on the signal from the cockpit voice recorder using hand-held sonars, but diving times were restricted by heavy seas. As of Friday morning that second “black box” had not been recovered.

The first box, the flight data recorder, was retrieved from the ocean floor September 6 and sent to a Transportation Safety Board of Canada lab in Ottawa. It yielded no information about the last six minutes of Flight 111 because it stopped recording at 10:25 p.m. when the aircraft was at 9,700 feet, probably due to electrical failure. But lead accident investigator Vic Gerden said the flight data recorder will still be useful to the probe into the cause of the crash because it provides data about what was happening up to that point.

En route from New York to Geneva, the flight crew reported smoke in the cockpit while over Nova Scotia at 10:14 p.m. and requested permission to land. Captain Urs Zimmermann and First Officer Stephan Loew were wearing oxygen masks less than two minutes later as they were directed toward Halifax International Airport. But when the crew was told at 10:19 p.m. that they had only 30 miles to the runway, they were still flying above 10,000 feet and said they needed more distance. Flight 111 turned toward the north, then announced that it needed to dump fuel before it could land. That type of aircraft, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, has a maximum landing weight of 200 tonnes and weighed 230 tonnes due to the additional fuel needed to get to Europe.

The flight crew continued its turn and headed over St. Margarets Bay beginning to fly manually at 10:24 p.m. Eighteen seconds later, Flight 111 declared an emergency, telling air traffic control it was beginning to dump fuel and had to land immediately. Seventeen seconds after the plane declared an emergency its flight data recorder stopped working, two seconds before the flight crew’s last intelligible transmission. At 10:31 p.m., Flight 111 plunged into the Atlantic with a force that registered as a slight tremor on the seismic scale. The flight data recorder, which monitors over 250 avionics systems in the aircraft, has already revealed several anomalies, Mr. Gerden said Thursday. While he would not speculate as to the cause of the accident, maintaining it is still “early days” in the investigation, the lead investigator said those faults might eventually be traced to a common problem. As for the cockpit voice recorder which captures conversation between the flight crew as well as mechanical noises in the aircraft, Mr. Gerden said even if it retrieved from the ocean floor intact, Canadian law prohibits the public release of transcripts taken from it.

advertisement

“In Canada, recorded cockpit voice recorder information is used strictly for the purpose of advancing transportation safety and there are tight restrictions on access to it and its use,” he told a media briefing Thursday. He said some factual information may be released to “facilitate understanding.”

Sea efforts continued to focus on the retrieval of that second black box and human remains last week. Officials said a large number of bodies had been located, presumably in the sections of fuselage found in 50 metres of water off the coast. Navy divers will go down with body bags to retrieve those victims before the sections are lifted. The Navy also announced that additional large pieces of the jet have been found, including partial engines, landing gear and wings. A quantity of the passengers’ luggage is also on the ocean floor. Seven Navy and seven Coast Guard ships continued to work last week on what they’ve dubbed Operation Persistence. The RCMP Patrol Vessel 'Simmonds' joined the team on Thursday to act as a floating detachment for the eight smaller RCMP boats involved in the salvage effort. The command ship 'HMCS Preserver' was replaced by Nova Scotia’s warship, the 'HMCS Halifax', early Friday. The 'Halifax' has been assigned to Operation Persistence for three weeks, although work off the South Shore is likely to last longer than that.

The salvage rescue ship 'USS Grapple' headed for the crash scene about 14 kilometres southwest of Peggy’s Cove Friday. The 255-foot vessel with state-of-the-art search and heavy-lifting capability was used in 1996 to recover sections of the TWA plane that crashed off New York. It will lift the large pieces of the MD-11 for return to Shearwater where investigators say they will try to reconstruct the aircraft as needed.

“At the moment this is a very, very challenging exercise and it will take awhile,” Mr. Gerden said Thursday. “If reconstructing a portion of the aircraft is going to be helpful then we’ll do that.”

Forty Transportation Safety Board investigators are working on the Flight 111 disaster along with about 380 RCMP officers who are divided between recovery and victim identification efforts. To date, the RCMP are still treating the crash as a possible crime, analyzing debris for evidence of a bomb although officials have said they’ve found no indication the crash resulted from terrorism.

“When Mr. Gerden can tell us conclusively that it was an accident, we will have little interest in investigating anything criminal,” RCMP Chief Superintendent Steve Duncan said last week. “But until that time, we have to make the assumption and continue on with the investigation.”

Hundreds of military, Coast Guard auxiliaries and Ground Search and Rescue volunteers continued to comb the beaches of St. Margarets and Mahone Bays last week collecting debris washed ashore. The province’s chief medical examiner, Dr. John Butt, announced the identification of two more bodies from dental records Thursday, bringing the total identifications to four of the 229 people on board the aircraft. The remains retrieved so far indicate impact injuries, rather than drowning or an explosion, caused the deaths. Family members who came to Nova Scotia following the crash assisted identification efforts by providing DNA samples, necessary to distinguish most of the remains recovered by late last week. The command centre at Peggy’s Cove was demobilized Monday. The lighthouse, the symbol of beauty which has become a symbol of anguish in the past two weeks, was returned to the public Tuesday. The mood, however, remained sombre as tourists and mourners continued to go to the rocks and stare at the ships working in the distance. At a makeshift memorial at the base of the lighthouse, loved ones of the crash victims and total strangers, left flowers, teddy bears and cards. A printed computer page, wet from the rain, showed a picture of AIDS activist Jonathan Mann under a headline about his death. Next to the photo, an inscription scrawled in blue ink read: “Jony — I love you always & will care for your children with the same love you had for them.”

Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Swiss President Flavio Cotti visited Peggy’s Cove following the September 9 memorial service at Indian Harbour. The Prime Minister expressed sympathy for the family members of the victims and appreciation for workers and volunteers.

“I just want to express my thanks to the people of the area for what they’ve done. I think they’ve been fantastic and I’ve received comments from the United States and France and Switzerland for the dedication and commitment and generosity of the people of this area,” Mr. Chretien said. “On behalf of the Government of Canada I want to thank all those involved.”

posted on 09/16/1998