'Contact lost' with Kenya flight

[Pieter C. 5]

No Chance Of Survivors From Kenya Plane - Cameroon

 

May 7, 2007

A Kenya Airways plane that crashed after takeoff in Cameroon with 114 people on board is largely submerged in a swamp and there is no chance of survivors, Cameroon's civil protection service said on Monday.

 

The Boeing 737-800 vanished early on Saturday shortly after leaving Douala for Nairobi in torrential rain. The aircraft was found late on Sunday not far from Douala Airport after nearly two days of fruitless searches in the south of the country.

 

"There are no chances that there will be any survivors because almost the entire body of the plane was buried inside the swamp," Jean-Pierre Nana, director of Cameroon's civil protection department and a member of a crisis working group set up by the prime minister said.

 

The passengers and crew hailed from 27 nations.

 

Early on Monday, rescuers battled through swamps and thick forest to reach the wreckage after parts of the aircraft were found late on Sunday in a swamp, and locals reported making grim discoveries in the thick bush.

 

"I saw one body and one arm," resident Guiffo Gande told reporters in Mbanga Pongo village, an area of dense mangrove swamps some 20 km east of Douala.

 

"We also saw some seats and a piece of plane about the size of a car door," Gande said, adding that he had not seen the plane's fuselage, engines or tail.

 

The crash has again thrown the spotlight on air safety in Africa, the continent with the world's worst record.

 

It has also dealt a severe blow to the image of Kenya Airways, one of the most successful and modern companies in the east African nation.

 

Rescue efforts resumed near the village at daybreak.

 

Search aircraft flew overhead, as troops and police carrying gas masks and plastic bags gathered at the end of a muddy road and then hacked deep into the waterlogged forest.

 

"The crash site is about 4-6 kms from the end of this road," said local gendarmerie commander Emmanuel Meka, telling journalists they were allowed no further for now.

 

"Last night we saw lots of mud, but it was dark. So we do not know what we will see today."

 

Cameroon's state minister for territorial administration, Hamidou Yaya Marafa, said the rescue operation was entering a "new painful phase".

 

"Our task will be more difficult now, the task of recovering the corpses," he said late on Sunday.

 

The crash site is more than 100 km from where radar-equipped helicopters, ground search parties and villagers on motorbikes spent most of the weekend combing tropical forest.

 

Kenya Airways Group Managing Director Titus Naikuni said in Nairobi that local fishermen had led rescuers to the crash site. He gave no details as to why the plane crashed.

 

The six-month-old aircraft was carrying 105 passengers and nine crew, most of them African, with others from China, India, Europe and elsewhere. It had originated in Ivory Coast.

 

(Reuters)

 

[adrianqcs 0]

Cameroon recovers plane crash bodies, black box

By Finbarr O'Reilly

 

MBANGA PONGO, Cameroon (Reuters) - Rescue workers in Cameroon pulled remains of victims from a fetid swamp on Monday two days after a Kenya Airways plane crashed, killing all 114 people on board.

 

The Boeing 737-800 fell into densely forested swampland early on Saturday, minutes after leaving Douala for Nairobi in torrential rain. Rescuers said they had found one of two "black box" recorders which may shed light on the cause of the crash.

 

Personal effects, including a laptop and passport, lie amid the debris at the scene of a Kenya Airways plane crash in a swampy area close to the village of Mbanga Pongo, 23 km east of the city of Douala, May 7, 2007. (REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly)

"It's devastating. I found one or two whole bodies at the start, but since then everything is in pieces," said Captain Francis Ekosso of Cameroon's fire department, who was in charge of the rescue operation.

 

"People were afraid of the bodies at the start, so I had to pick them up with my own hands, and they came apart in my fingers," he said.

 

The plane was found late on Sunday in a mangrove swamp near Mbanga Pongo, around 20 km from Douala airport.

 

In a round crater gouged out of the bush, victims' remains lay amid clothes, personal belongings and plane debris in a hole filled with muddy water smelling of jet fuel and decomposition.

 

Rescue workers used a mobile generator to pump away water to expose more of the wreckage, and retrieved one of the plane's black box recorders, said Celeste Mandeng, of Cameroon's Civil Protection Service.

 

He was unable to specify whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice register which had been recovered.

 

Apart from the plane's nose jammed into the mud, there was little left of the rest of the aircraft except fragments little bigger than a car door.

 

Rescue workers had to hack through dense mangrove and forest to reach the wreckage as helicopters and planes buzzed overhead.

 

They then returned the several kilometres to the nearest road carrying stretchers bearing victims' remains wrapped in white plastic.

 

Kamal Shah, a 32-year-old Kenyan who flew out from Nairobi after the crash, searched through the wreckage in silence for any signs of his wife, Meera Shah, 30. She had been on her way home from a short business trip, he said.

 

INITIAL SEARCH OFF COURSE

 

The wreckage was located after nearly two days of fruitless searches well over 100 km away in southern Cameroon, where radar-equipped helicopters and villagers on motorbikes spent most of the weekend combing tropical forest.

 

Mandeng said early search efforts had mistakenly focused on an area much further south based on information received from a satellite tracking centre in Spain.

 

"The experts will check what has happened," he told Reuters.

 

The crash has again thrown the spotlight on air safety in Africa, the continent with the world's worst record.

 

It dealt a severe blow to the image of Kenya Airways, one of the most successful and modern companies in the east African nation. The airline is listed on three East African bourses and is 26 percent owned by Air France's Dutch arm KLM.

 

The six-month-old aircraft was carrying 105 passengers and nine crew from 27 nations, mostly African, with others from China, India, Europe and elsewhere.

 

As soon as the plane disappeared, questions were asked about why a jet less than a year old would have crashed.

 

The flight had originated in Ivory Coast, where a Kenya Airways Airbus A-310 plunged into the sea moments after takeoff in January 2000, killing all but 10 of the 179 people on board.

 

(Additional reporting by Tansa Musa in Yaounde, Wangui Kanina and Bryson Hull in Nairobi, Andrew Quinn in Johannesburg, Alistair Thomson in Dakar)

 

 

[Naim 6]

Reconstructing the last moments of Kenya Airways Flight 507

 

The Associated Press

Friday, May 11, 2007

 

DOUALA, Cameroon: Three jetliners sat ready for takeoff at Douala International Airport, their crews waiting for a massive thunderstorm to move away.

 

Just a few minutes past midnight, all three radioed air traffic control to check the weather report. They were told the storm would take another hour to dissipate, and the Cameroon Airlines and Royal Air Maroc crews opted to wait it out.

 

But Capt. Francis Mbatia Wamwea of Kenya Airways Flight 507, already delayed for an hour and carrying scores of passengers with onward connections to catch, judged the weather had improved sufficiently to permit departure for Nairobi, Kenya.

 

It was a fateful decision that investigators believe may have cost the lives of the nine crew and 105 passengers of Flight 507, which was ensnared in the raging storm this past Saturday and crashed into the jungle less than a minute after takeoff.

 

After Wamwea gave the go-ahead, the Kenyan Airways crew radioed the tower, pulled away from the gate and taxied toward Runway 12, heading roughly southwest from the airport.

 

Douala tower cleared the flight for takeoff at 1 a.m., instructing it to report on reaching 5,000 feet (1,500 meters).

 

The pilot acknowledged. It was not clear what time that final voice transmission was received from the Boeing 737-800.

 

The plane nose-dived into a swamp on the outskirts of Cameroon's commercial hub just 30 seconds after becoming airborne, killing all aboard. The passengers included Cameroonian merchants, an American AIDS expert, businesspeople from China, India and South Africa, a Tanzanian returning from peacekeeping duties in Ivory Coast, a U.N. refugee worker from Togo. Anthony Mitchell, a Nairobi-based correspondent for The Associated Press, was among the victims.

 

The six-month old plane was of the newest generation of the world's most popular airliner and has an excellent safety record. This is only the second time a 737-800 has crashed with the loss of all on board. Last September, an airliner belonging to Brazil's Gol airline collided in mid-air with an executive jet over the Amazon jungle.

 

One Cameroonian investigator and a government pilot assisting the probe, both speaking on condition of anonymity because fact-finding is still underway, said Wamwea's decision to depart into one of the violent tropical storms that regularly ravages parts of equatorial Africa during the rainy season was most likely the pivotal factor in a sequence of events that led to the crash in which all 114 aboard perished.

 

In Kenya Friday, Kenya Airways chief executive Titus Naikuni said investigators would have to make the final assessment. The probe was likely to take months.

 

"We don't want to start speculating here," he said. "So whether the pilot did the wrong thing or the right thing, I cannot answer that."

 

Flight crews are responsible for the decision whether to take off or land in bad weather, usually depending on guidelines prescribed by their airline. And while air traffic control can take measures to prevent flights, including closing down airports, such drastic measures are highly unusual outside the northern hemisphere where heavy winter snows can block runways and bring traffic to a standstill.

 

Douala airport is not equipped with weather radar, but the 737-800 is. Pilots routinely take off into stormy weather and then rely on radar to guide them around the towering cumulonimbus thunderheads that can cause structural damage to airframes.

 

Wamwea, 53, was an experienced flyer with about 8,500 hours on jets. He had joined Kenya Airways 20 years ago and enjoyed the reputation of a diligent and professional pilot.

 

The co-pilot, Andrew Kiuru was only 23. He joined the airline a year ago after completing flight school in South Africa.

 

The cockpit voice recorder has not yet been found, so no details of the final exchanges between Wamwea and Kiuru are available. It remains unclear which man was flying the plane at the time, but Wamwea would have been the ultimate authority.

 

The flight data recorder has been recovered.

 

Two minutes after Flight 507 would have been expected to reach 5,000 feet, the point at which it had been instructed to check in, Douala Area Control Center issued a distress message. This is normal practice by air traffic control when unable to immediately establish contact with an aircraft, a fairly frequent occurrence. But controllers, who had lost sight of the plane fairly quickly because of the storm, were not unduly worried because the plane had fuel for six hours flying time.

 

A search was launched at 2:44 a.m. when a French radar station sent in a message that an airplane distress signal had been picked up. A Cameroonian air force plane and two helicopters first flew over a region far to the south, basing their search on the distress signal which was in fact hundreds of kilometers (miles) away from the actual crash.

 

It is unclear why the signal was so far off the mark, but it appears the plane's emergency locator beacon's final signal was garbled — indicating a false position.

 

And although the crash site is virtually directly beneath the flight path for planes taking off from Douala, nobody saw it because of the jungle canopy that covers the area.

 

The wreckage was found 40 hours after takeoff by a local hunter who chanced upon it in a mangrove swamp and reported it to the air force. It was located just 5.4 kilometers (3.4 miles) from Runway 12. Using speed calculations, experts estimate the plane had been in the air for just 30 seconds and had never climbed over 3,000 feet (914.4 meters).

 

Commercial jets regularly fly over the area, one of several standard departure routes from Runway 12. Villagers living near the swamp said they heard planes passing overhead during the night, and a particularly loud boom which sounded like a thunderbolt.

 

Since there were no witnesses to the crash itself, investigators have pieced together the known facts and formulated several theories on what could have happened.

 

The wreckage in the thick jungle indicated the plane flew nose-first into the ground at a nearly 90 degree angle. It was found buried deep in a crater of reddish-brown muck with only tiny bits of the rear fuselage and wings left above ground. Trees nearby were smashed, but otherwise the jungle canopy remains intact, making the site almost invisible from the air.

 

Investigators said the nose-dive indicated that a violent gust of wind within a thundercloud may have flipped the airliner over, throwing it into a fatal dive. Although modern jets can usually fly through storm clouds, storms in Africa are particularly violent at this time of the year, investigators said.

 

The location of the wreckage also indicates the pilot was maneuvering at the time, banking sharply to the right. This would have exposed the raised left wing to the gust, investigators said.

 

The low altitude, would have made it impossible to recover from the resulting dive.

 

Investigators said they cannot yet discount other factors, including mechanical failure, pilot disorientation or even sabotage. But no sign of a blast or fire has been found so far by the search teams, which include seven experts from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and two Boeing representatives.

 

Investigators say it will likely take months to collect and analyze the evidence. They said a final report on the crash would probably not be completed this year.

 

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/11/...ents.php?page=2

 

___

[Radzi 2]

Too early to tell, but look out for keywords microburst, downdraft.

 

At 1 am local time, all they have is the weather radar, which is not very effective from the ground as there are too many ground clutter. Therefore they wouldn't know exactly how fierce the TS could be. And at altitude below 3000 ft, all you would want to do is climb, climb, climb.

 

How many sectors has the crew done on that day? Is it the last sector of the day? Get-home-itis in play again?

[Naim 6]

WITNESS - Horror of Kenya Airways crash hits close to home

Sun May 13, 2007 1:45PM BST

 

By Finbarr O'Reilly

 

MBANGA PONGO, Cameroon (Reuters) - Our desire as journalists to reach the scene of a plane crash that killed 114 people in Cameroon last week was tempered by the fear of what we would find once we got there.

 

Any accident site is bound to be grisly.

 

But this one was worse than most after misguided search efforts took two days to locate the wreckage of the Kenya Airways Boeing 737-800 which went missing shortly after taking off from Douala airport late on May 4.

 

Tropical heat at the crash site, a fetid mangrove swamp surrounded by dense forest, meant bodies rotted quickly.

 

Reporters and photographers were granted access only after being made to wait six hours in the sweltering sun by Cameroonian soldiers who seemed more bent on asserting their authority than assisting the recovery mission.

 

International interest ran high because passengers from more than 20 countries were on board the stricken aircraft.

 

Among them was an Associated Press journalist Anthony Mitchell, a Nairobi-based correspondent returning home to Kenya after an assignment.

 

I did not know Mitchell, a Briton, but many friends and colleagues did and whenever the journalistic community loses one of its own there is a profound sense of loss and disbelief that goes beyond normal sadness at the human tragedy.

 

Journalists working in Africa often face risks.

 

Bouncing along on the back of a rickety truck with rebels crossing a remote desert war zone, or sitting on a box of grenades in a dilapidated military plane bumping through the air high above a jungle is part of our job.

 

We frequently cover stories that involve death and sometimes use grisly humour to cope.

 

But there were no jokes on this day.

 

NEED TO SEE

 

Wading through knee-deep mud, clinging to dripping vines or using hacked off tree branches as walking sticks, local and foreign journalists struggled to the crash site.

 

The smell hit us first. The overpowering odour of spilled jet fuel and decomposition made several journalists sick. Others fainted.

 

More than once, I wondered why such a ghoulish mission was necessary. The argument given to obstructive soldiers was that it is important for people to see what happened.

 

But I asked myself whether this was true. What could be gained from seeing this?

 

The answer came in the quiet presence of Kamal Shah, a 32-year-old Kenyan whose wife, Meera, 30, was on the plane on her way home from a short business trip.

 

With family members banned from the crash site, Shah posed as a journalist to gain access.

 

As we busied ourselves with our work, Shah slowly and silently picked his way through the stinking mud, twisted metal, tree roots, scattered clothing, a dead snake and other debris.

 

After several hours, he came up to me, covered in mud and sweating.

 

Somehow, he'd recovered his wife's wallet from the mess.

 

"It means a lot just to find this, to see her smile on her photo ID," he said, his lips and hands trembling.

 

People do want to see, in order to understand. Still, some things are best not photographed.

 

Among the debris were private items -- smiling family pictures, birthday cards, intimate letters, and identity documents -- all too heartbreakingly personal to show.

 

Working as a photographer allows a certain remove from the subject matter, as we try to capture images that tell the story.

 

But at one point, while reporting in details to our Dakar office for a print story, I looked down to find my foot submerged in muck and standing on part of a corpse.

 

I was revolted, but even more, I felt guilty.

 

Who was it? A mother, a crew member, someone travelling to visit their lover? There's no way ever to know.

 

Mud washes off at the end of the day.

 

But thoughts of our own mortality do not.

 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews...226272220070513

[Pieter C. 5]

French Satellite Data Misled Plane Search - Cameroon

 

May 11, 2007

Data from a French satellite station led Cameroon rescuers 150 km off track as they searched last weekend for a crashed Kenya Airways plane in which 114 people died, Cameroon's government said.

 

After nearly two days combing thick forest in southern Cameroon, rescuers found the plane late on Sunday in a swamp less than 6 km away from Douala Airport where it had taken off, prompting widespread criticism over the delay.

 

Communication Minister Ebenezer Njoh Moulle said early search efforts had followed a lead based on information from the French Satellite Tracking Centre in Toulouse.

 

"The information they furnished pointed to two areas, one in South Africa and the other in Nyong and Soo (southern Cameroon). That is why the initial search for the plane was directed to Lolodorf and its surroundings, which is about 150 km from the actual crash site," he told reporters in Yaounde.

 

The six-month-old Boeing 737-800 was carrying 105 passengers and nine crew from 27 nations, mostly African, with others from China, India, Europe and elsewhere.

 

Kenya's two main daily newspapers led their front pages on Thursday with questions about the crash, including why it took so long to find the accident site and wreckage.

 

"Is Cameroon able to handle the probe into this disaster? How could it take more than 24 hours to discover that a plane had crashed 30 seconds after take off and only 5 km away?" asked the East African Standard.

 

"We are bound to ask questions as to why the plane's distress signal frequency failed to operate automatically as it ought to be the case," Moulle said.

 

"Whatever the case, only the results of the on-going inquiry will tell us something about the technical problem that accounts for the delay in locating the wreckage of the plane and what went wrong with its distress signal frequency," he said.

 

Rescuers retrieved the in-flight data recorder, one of two "black boxes" on board, on Monday.

 

"There is still a distress beacon from the back of the plane which has not been found, and the voice recorder from the cockpit which could help determine the cause, which is 15 metres (yards) underground," Cameroon's Secretary of State for Transport Ndanga Ndinga Badel said in Douala.

 

Grieving relatives of the victims were urged to be patient as rescuers recover the last bodies from the stinking, waterlogged crash site ahead of a painstaking identification process.

 

(Reuters)

 

[Pieter C. 5]

Some more 'news' revealed about the KQ crash:

 

Kenya Air Crash Pilot Took Off Despite Storm Warning

 

May 15, 2007

The pilot of a Kenya Airways plane that crashed in Cameroon this month decided to take off in stormy weather while other flights waited for conditions to improve, Cameroon's civil aviation chief said on Tuesday.

 

Cameroon has launched an investigation into the crash of the six-month-old Boeing 737-800, which crashed into swampy jungle not far from Douala Airport shortly after taking off around midnight on May 4-5. All 114 people on board were killed.

 

Relatives of the victims have criticized Cameroonian authorities over their handling of the accident. Search parties took nearly two days to locate the plane wreckage, which was found less than 6 km from the end of the runway.

 

The head of Cameroon's Civil Aviation Authority, Ignatius Sama Juma, said the Douala control tower had advised the captain of Kenya Airways Flight 507 of the stormy weather conditions.

 

"Certainly, there was a storm problem," Sama Juma told Radio France Internationale, adding that only the official inquiry would determine whether the crash was caused by a technical fault or human error.

 

Sama Juma said the captains of two other planes also due to leave Douala the same night both decided to wait for weather conditions to improve. They left safely.

 

"The control tower gave all the meteorological information to the commander of (the Kenya Airways) flight... but he decided to take off... it was his decision," Sama Juma said.

 

There were angry scenes near the site of the crash on Monday when Cameroonian soldiers prevented a group of relatives of crash victims from visiting the location because they said the accident site required further work.

 

The dead passengers came from 27 nations, mostly African, but with others from China, India, Europe and elsewhere.

 

Only one "black box", the flight data recorder, has been recovered. Rescuers were looking for the cockpit voice recorder.

 

Responding to criticism that Cameroonian authorities wasted nearly two days searching for the plane 150 km from the crash site, Sama Juma said the automatic distress beacon on board had stopped transmitting soon after take-off.

 

"When the crash took place... we think the beacon was immediately destroyed... it stopped transmitting, so that made precise location more difficult," the official said.

 

He added the search was misled by data provided by a satellite tracking station in Toulouse.

 

Sama Juma said Douala Airport did not have a ground surveillance radar, which would have made it much easier to locate the wreckage. "It's expensive to install surveillance radar," he said.

 

(Reuters)

 

Captain Radzi could be right with his get-home-itis

 

[Pieter C. 5]

Kenya Airways Crash Blamed On Pilot Actions

 

April 28, 2010

 

Pilot error was the probable cause for the crash of a Kenya Airways 737 jet in Cameroon in May 2007 which killed all 114 people on board, a technical investigation has found.

 

The Boeing 737-800 plunged into a mangrove swamp on a stormy night minutes after taking off from Douala, the west African nation's largest city, en route to Nairobi.

 

"The airplane crashed after loss of control by the crew as a result of spatial disorientation... after a long slow roll during which no instrument scanning was done, and in the absence of external visual references in a dark night," said the report released by the Cameroonian authorities on Tuesday.

 

The crash report, compiled by the Cameroonian Civil Aviation Authority, found the pilot failed to notice the aircraft was banking slowly to the right as it gained altitude.

 

Just before a warning alarm sounded, the captain grabbed the control column making erratic movements and sending the jet into a steeper turn.

 

As the aircraft banked beyond 90 degrees, descending into a downward spiral, the first officer called out "Left, left, left captain," moments before the airliner hit the ground.

 

The airline, which is 26 percent owned by Air France-KLM, said it had reservations over the report's findings that the pilot had not properly engaged the autopilot after take off.

 

"One (reservation) is to do with the auto pilot, CRM (Crew Resources Management) and safety programme implementation," Titus Naikuni, the head of Kenya Airways, told reporters.

 

The report also said the Boeing flight manual did not include full information on the ability of the aircraft's autopilot to roll the plane to a safe degree of banking from a dangerous level.

 

(Reuters)