Word: swissair
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...enough of it is found, physical evidence can be as helpful as black boxes, or even more helpful, to air-disaster investigators in figuring out what went wrong. Painstaking examination of the wreckage of a New York City-Geneva Swissair flight that mysteriously crashed into the Atlantic in 1998 ultimately revealed a swiftly spreading electrical fire as the cause. Hayes also notes that after the Pan Am 747 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the discovery of metal fragments and an examination of the type of damage to one section of the plane pointed experts to a small bomb...
...That's why, with 20 or so days left before Flight 447's black box stops its sonar pinging, the French sub and two radar-equipped ships from the U.S. and the Netherlands have joined the hunt. Their job is daunting. "Experts in the TWA and Swissair inquiries did absolutely excellent work, but they recovered sea wreckage in depths of 100 to 130 ft. [30 to 40 m], while the Air France search is in waters of about 12,000 ft. [3,600 m]," says aeronautic engineer Favé. "With most of Flight 447 that far underwater, French investigators...
...France Flight 447, says Gourguechon. "As frustrating as it is, we'll need more information before we can imagine any scenarios." But for Learmount, if a short-circuit fire is to blame, one thing is for sure. "We have to look here for the lessons we got from that [Swissair flight]," he says. "Airplanes should have heat and smoke detectors all over them ... so that if a fire started anywhere, you would know immediately." He adds, "That has not been implemented by any of the world's leading aviation authorities, not by the [U.K.'s] Civil Aviation Authority, the French...
...hidden fire onboard is among the ultimate nightmare scenarios for pilots, and the 1998 tragedy of Swissair Flight 111, which crashed off the coast of Canada after flammable material in the aircraft structure allowed a fire to spread unbeknownst to the crew, remains vivid in the minds of many aviation-safety experts. "[The Swissair flight] rattled a lot of cages in the industry," says Learmount. "A lot of things have changed since that time, but there's still one thing that hasn't changed, and that is, for all the sophistication of today's airplanes, if a fire starts onboard...
...aviation equivalent of the modern, expensive, very sophisticated car," he says. "It just never goes wrong, and if it does, it self-diagnoses and sends messages back to base." But despite all these technological advances, progress can still be made in dealing with fire detection, he says. "[Since the Swissair flight] there were loads of people in the industry saying it is just not acceptable to have modern airplanes being churned out with the most amazing safety systems, and yet if a fire starts, it can actually progress quite a long way before anybody knows it's happening." (Read...