Jet crash in Halifax is fourth for airline

 

Photo: Andrew Vaughan/CP

Firefighters walk past a large section of a cargo plane owned by British-based MK Airlines at the Halifax International Airport on Thursday.

By SHAWNA RICHER

From Friday's Globe and Mail

UPDATED AT 1:41 AM EDT Friday, Oct 15, 2004

Halifax — As Mounties and investigators picked through the still-smouldering wreckage of a Boeing 747 cargo jet that crashed at Halifax International Airport killing all seven crew, the airline skirted questions Thursday night about its shaky safety record.

MK Airlines Flight 1602 crashed in the darkness while attempting takeoff at 3:52 a.m. local time Thursday. The 747-200 wide-body jet was headed for Zaragosa, Spain, loaded with 53,305 kilograms of seafood — lobsters and silver hake — and garden tractors.

This was the fourth major crash for MK Airlines in the past 13 years. All the previous ones occurred in Nigeria, and all on takeoff or landing. A November, 2001, crash killed one crew member.

But Thursday's disaster was MK's worst yet.

MK Airlines official Captain John Power, arriving last night from England where the company is based, looked shaken when pressed about the airline's other crashes. He refused to address them or relate any of their circumstances to what happened in Halifax.

“I'm not here to defend, I'm here to support this investigation,” Capt. Power said. “My primary focus is to establish the cause of this accident. I don't want, at this point, to be sidetracked.”

Bill Fowler, a Halifax-based representative from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said Thursday night that details of MK's previous crashes would be considered in the investigation.

“We're too early into this to speculate, but if there are elements that are systemic in other accidents, we will look into that,” he said. “It's a matter of course; we will look at those to see if they link. We haven't found out any links, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.”

He said a preliminary search into the history of this particular aircraft, built in 1980 and registered in Ghana, a former British colony, revealed no problems.

In November, 2001, an MK Boeing 747 crashed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, killing one of 13 crew members. The aircraft went down about 700 metres short of a runway while trying to land on a flight from Luxembourg. The plane was built in 1980.

In December, 1996, an MK McDonnell Douglas DC-8 struck trees on approach at the same airport in Port Harcourt. The aircraft touched down 250 metres short of the runway, hit approach lights, went onto the runway and veered off, catching fire. That plane was built in 1968.

In February, 1992, when the airline was just two years old, another DC-8, this one built in 1966, crashed and caught fire on landing in Kano, Nigeria, according to a database contained on a website named AirDisaster.com.

Names of the crew were not released. The plane was carrying a captain, first officer and flight engineer, plus a loadmaster and three spare crew who were hitching rides home. There were four Britons, two Zimbabweans and one German.

The MK Airlines head office is in Hartfield, East Sussex, in southern England, but its aviation base is in Ghana, from where it oversees its key African cargo market.

Mr. Fowler, who said police were still heading the investigation Thursday night, refused to speculate on what caused the fiery crash in the darkness of the wee hours.

“Very early in an investigation there is a lot of speculation,” Mr. Fowler said. “We have no information one way or another and we'll let the investigation follow its course. We're gathering data and looking at abnormalities. The critical element is to determine the sequence of events pre-impact and post-impact.” Earlier in the day, there were reports an explosion preceded the crash, but Mr. Fowler said “preliminary information doesn't suggest that.”

Investigators are considering the possibility that the tail struck the runway before the plane was airborne. Some of the details about the crash site and the way in which wreckage was strewn over a relatively compact area about the size of a football field suggest that the plane never lifted far off the ground and thudded into the earth without gaining much speed.

An enormous section of the tail was found in a field near the end of the runway, about 60 metres from the crash site.

Peter Garrison, a pilot, engineer and long-time columnist for Flying Magazine who writes mainly on airline crashes, said that while it is difficult to speculate so early in an investigation, experts probing the crash would typically first look at the aircraft's centre of gravity.

As of late Thursday, Mr. Fowler said that transportation safety officials had not reached the core of the debris. The probe was suspended at dusk and is to resume at daybreak.

The doomed plane arrived from Hartford, Conn., on Wednesday evening to pick up a load of seafood and refuel, taking on 40,000 kilograms, Mr. Fowler said. Two witnesses who were near the runway at the time of the crash reported an explosion and at least two bright, orange flashes in the night sky. It took 60 firefighters about five hours to put out the blaze, and smaller fires were kept burning by jet fuel.

“All I saw was the nose going up and it looked like it was dragging and then the power went out and then you just saw white and orange sky,” said Darren MacLaughlin, who saw the crash.

An early and eerie look at the wreckage suggested no chance for survival. Only the centre hull of the fuselage, charred and smoking, was intact. The plane cleared the runway, a fence and a road, but not by much, shearing off tops of trees and power poles, and crashing into the woods about 50 metres from the runway.

Both wings were torn off, the engines ripped from the wings and scattered about. The wreckage suggests the plane had little forward speed by the time it was trying to lift off. Losing the tail would make the jet a few tonnes lighter so the body could have cleared the fence as the pilot lost control.

Mr. Fowler said Thursday night that to his knowledge the voice data recorders had not been recovered. He said a National Transportation Safety Board official from the United States and an official from the UK Aircraft Investigation Bureau were on their way to Halifax and would join the probe on Friday.

MK Airlines has been running chartered flights in and out of Halifax for nearly 18 months. Two months ago, the Canadian Transportation Agency granted MK a new permit to fly twice a week between Halifax and Spain. That flight permit is due to expire Oct. 31, agency spokesman Craig Lee said Thursday.

The airline, through a Ghanaian unit, has applied to the Canadian regulator for an additional series of twice-weekly cargo flights between Nov. 4, 2004, and Jan. 30, 2005, for the Halifax-Spain route. Getting cargo service up and running between Halifax and Spain hasn't been smooth. After a single delivery on the Halifax-Spain route by MK Airlines in the spring of 2003, the federal cabinet overruled the Canadian Transportation Agency's granting of a permit to the airline for a series of cargo flights.

At the time, a spokeswoman for then-transportation-minister David Collenette said the regulator had misinterpreted government policy in granting the permit. Air Canada was seen to have been potentially harmed because MK would steal away cargo business.

But MK and one of its customers, Zeus Seafood Inc., appealed to the Federal Court of Canada, paving the way for the transportation regulator to authorize new cargo operations in November, 2003. MK Airlines received its first cargo permit to operate out of Halifax in the spring of 2003, including a Halifax-Luxembourg route.

With a report from Brent Jang in Calgary