Air crash in Phuket ( VTSP ) on 16 September 2007

[Desmond C 0]

1st crash for this airline. My condolences for those victims and families involved.

[Pieter C. 5]

Thai Investigators Sift Through Phuket Plane Wreck

 

September 17, 2007

Thai air investigators sifted though the wreckage on Monday of a budget airliner that crashed on the resort isle of Phuket, killing 88 people as it broke up while trying to land in driving rain.

 

As well as looking for clues as to why the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 veered off the runway and crashed into a densely wooded embankment, rescue workers still have to recover five bodies from the wreckage.

 

Both pilots were killed, deputy transport minister Sansern Wong-Chaum said, but 42 people survived a crash that is likely to raise more safety questions for the dozens of budget carriers that have sprung up across Asia in the last decade.

 

Five survivors were in critical condition, with burns to 60 percent of their bodies, hospital officials said.

 

The "black box" flight data recorder has been recovered and much of the investigation is likely to focus on the weather conditions as the plane, flown by Bangkok-based low-cost operator One-Two-Go, was coming in to land.

 

"We will have to wait for the actual cause of the accident. We will send the black box to the United States. It will take one week to analyze," Sansern told Thailand's Channel 7 television.

 

Survivors spoke of torrential rain and trees bent over in the wind, and several accounts suggested the pilot attempted to land, but then aborted.

 

"The pilot tried to bring the plane back up. He started to turn right and made a sharp turn right and then the plane went into the embankment," Millie Furlong, a 23-year-old waitress from Canada, said in hospital.

 

"I saw the grass and knew we were going to crash. It was very quick."

 

Udom Tantiprasongchai, chairman of One-Two-Go parent company Orient Thai Airlines, said the pilot was experienced.

 

"Police will set up an investigating committee to find out what actually caused the accident. What we need to do right now is take care of the injured," he told reporters on Sunday evening. "I'm deeply sorry about this tragic event."

 

Despite a number of crashes and scares, most recently in Indonesia, analysts say there is no hard evidence to suggest budget carriers are more accident-prone than their full-service competitors.

 

So far, the only foreigner confirmed dead from the crash is French. There has been no word on other nationalities, although in a country that welcomes more than 12 million tourists a year, they are likely to be from every corner of the globe.

 

Airports of Thailand said there were seven crew and 78 foreigners on board, most of them European holiday-makers. Fourteen Thais, eight Britons, five Iranians and four Germans were among the survivors, hospital workers said.

 

Officials said the plane had broken in two when it touched down on the isle, still dubbed the "Pearl of the Andaman" despite the devastation wrought by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

 

(Reuters)

 

[Naim 6]

I've ridden the MD-82 a couple of times, I think. The nice thing about being in a plane with rear engines, is about how much quieter it seems. And also, the plane sort of faces up when landing, due to the propulsion coming from the back.

 

+++

 

Survivors Recount Thai Plane Crash

 

By THOMAS FULLER

Published: September 17, 2007

 

BANGKOK, Sept. 17 — “You could hear his foot hitting the door as he was kicking it,” said Millie Furlong, a 23-year-old waitress from Vancouver. The emergency exit over the left wing of flight OG269 was stuck.

 

Acrid smoke filled the cabin and “smelled like every kind of chemical,” Ms. Furlong said. Time was running out. “There were flames everywhere and people burning,” she said.

 

In an interview from her hospital room in Phuket, the Thai island resort where a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 operated by the low-cost carrier One-Two-GO crashed on Sunday, Ms. Furlong offered a lucid and detailed account of the escape from the plane’s burning wreckage.

 

She said she and most of the 40 other passengers who escaped owe their survival to a man in the row behind her who was wearing a black shirt and had short, brown hair.

 

“He’s the only way anybody escaped,” Ms. Furlong said. “He kicked the emergency exit that everybody got through.”

 

He kicked it “over and over and over” until the door began to open, Ms. Furlong recounted.

 

“At first it was just a crack,” she said. “It was quite difficult to make it peel back. And then finally it did, at the last second, right before everybody passed out.”

 

Rescue workers, who arrived after passengers had exited the plane, could not corroborate Ms. Furlong’s account. But according to the passenger manifest, almost all of the survivors had one thing in common: they were all seated in the middle or the back of the aircraft near the left-hand side emergency exit at row 24.

 

Of the 41 survivors, 36 were seated from rows 18 to 29. One survivor was unidentified, and two passengers’ names, as they were listed in local news media, did not match with the manifest.

 

Only two survivors appeared to be seated in the front of the plane: Thibaud Lamare in seat 10F and Christopher Cooley in seat 6A. The rows in the aircraft ran from 1 to 29.

 

One possible explanation for the escape of the passengers sitting in the front of the plane is that they were ejected during the crash.

 

One emergency worker said in an interview that he rescued a man who had been catapulted from the wreck.

 

“I rescued a foreign guy who was outside of the plane and stuck on his seat with his seatbelt fastened,” Anit Chenrob, 23, said in a telephone interview. “His legs were broken.”

 

Of 130 passengers and crew members on the flight, 89 were killed, most of them seated in the front of the aircraft, which was crushed when it hit an embankment. Rescue workers today retrieved the last bodies from the wreckage, including the Indonesian pilot and the Thai co-pilot.

 

Of those killed in the crash, 34 were Thais and 55 foreigners, many of them Europeans on vacation, according to Thailand’s Deputy Transport Minister, Sansern Wongchaum. Four Americans were killed, according to the United States Embassy in Bangkok, and an unknown number of passengers from France, Sweden, Iran and Australia. With many bodies badly burnt, identification may take days.

 

The identity of the man who kicked the door out remains elusive. The manifest shows that the man sitting in 24A, the seat next to the emergency exit, was Peter Hill.

 

Reached in his hospital room, Mr. Hill sounded disoriented.

 

He said he could remember trying to get the door open. “But I can’t remember anything more,” he said.

 

When asked if he was wearing a black t-shirt, he paused to think.

 

“Hold on — yeah, I was wearing a black shirt,” he said. But Mr. Hill said the passenger next to him, Scott Harrow, according to the manifest, might have also been wearing a black shirt.

 

“Honestly at the moment I can’t remember,” Mr. Hill said. “I was sitting next to the — next to the exit, but it could be the other guy. It could be that both of us got the door open. I can’t remember.”

 

A number of survivors interviewed by the Thai news media described leaving through the emergency exit.

 

Chaowalert Jitjumnong, seated in 22A, recounted crawling out on the wing. Nong Khaonuan, in seat 26A, dragged his wife, in 26B, out the emergency exit.

 

Parinwit Chusaeng, seated in 20B, said she climbed over passengers engulfed in flames. “I stepped over them on the way out of the plane,” Ms. Parinwit told The Nation TV channel. “I was afraid that the airplane was going to explode.”

 

The cause of the crash, which took place amid heavy rain and wind, remains unclear.

 

Officials and executives from One-Two-GO speculated that a sudden change in wind speed or direction might have contributed to the accident, but a more definitive conclusion will not be reached until the flight data recorders, which were retrieved today, are analyzed at a laboratory in the United States.

 

Sunday’s crash was Thailand’s deadliest aviation accident since December 1998, when a Thai Airways plane crashed while trying to land in heavy rain at Surat Thani, killing 101 people.

 

Ms. Furlong said today that she would like to thank the man who kicked the door open because she owes her life to him. They had exchanged smiles during boarding — “you know the common smile at each other when you sit down,” she said.

 

On Sunday evening she described the man to a nurse.

 

“I just said I was wanting to know about the guy,” Ms. Furlong said.

 

“I told her about this person who kicked open the door. I just said, I wanted to know what happened to him.”

 

The nurse got back to Ms. Furlong. “She said, ‘He’s a British guy, and, yes, he remembers you.’ ”

 

Pornnapa Wongakanit contributed reporting from Bangkok.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/as....html?ref=world

[Wai Hung 0]

aircraft history :

 

[Naim 6]

Thai aviation official says pilot warned of wind shear before crash

 

The Associated Press

Monday, September 17, 2007

Click here to find out more!

 

PHUKET, Thailand: A senior aviation official said Monday that the pilot of a passenger plane that crashed while landing at Thailand's resort island of Phuket, killing 89 people, had been warned of a treacherous wind shear at the airport, but he decided to land anyway.

 

Wind shear — a sudden change in either wind speed or direction in an aircraft's flight path — can destabilize a plane, as pilots compensate for the condition, which can then suddenly disappear and put the aircraft out of control.

 

There were 123 passengers and seven crew members abroad One-Two-Go Airlines flight OG268 when it crashed Sunday while apparently trying to abort a landing at Phuket airport. The pilot and co-pilot were among the five crew members killed.

 

According to a transcript of the conversation between the control tower and the plane, ground officials informed the Indonesian pilot, Arief Mulyadi, about wind shear at the airport but he decided to land anyway, the Air Transport Department's director-general, Chaisak Ungsuwan, said on The Nation TV channel.

 

"The last word the pilot said was 'landing,'" he said.

 

"It is possible that the plane crash was caused by wind shear," Kajit Habnanonda, president of Orient-Thai Airlines, which owns One-Two-Go, said earlier, adding that heavy rains could have contributed to the plane skidding off the runway.

 

Transport Minister Theera Haocharoen cautioned that it was still to early to know what caused the crash of the McDonnell Douglas MD-82.

 

"The officials have found the black boxes and will send them for analysis to the United States," he said. "Hopefully, we will learn in a few weeks the cause of the accident." Others suggested it could take a year to determine the cause.

 

One aviation expert said the pilot had reportedly asked to abandon the landing and circle around again because he could not see the runway, but the plane was already too low.

 

"It was hit by wind shear or strong winds and he didn't have time to react," said Tom Ballantyne, chief corespondent for Orient Aviation magazine, adding that the bigger question was whether the airport should have been allowing planes to land in such weather.

 

In March this year, an Indonesian jetliner battled sudden wind shear before crash-landing, damaging an emergency door that may have prevented some passengers from escaping after it erupted in flames, the pilot and an investigator said.

 

Twenty-one people died, but 119 others survived after scrambling through exits at the back of the Garuda Airlines Boeing 737-400.

 

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/09/17/...-Wind-Shear.php

 

[Jerry Ang 0]

My condolences to the families of those who perished in the crash.

 

This year is not a good year for aviation - so many crash & incidents occuring, almost back to back with each other!

[Naim 6]

This year is not a good year for aviation - so many crash & incidents occuring, almost back to back with each other!

 

Here are the biggies for 2007. That's a total of 524 dead, just one month's worth of road accidents' deaths in Malaysia. Weep for the 16-18 dying on our roads every day.

 

2007

 

16 September: At least 87 people are killed after a One-Two-Go plane crashed on landing in bad weather at the Thai resort of Phuket.

 

17 July: A TAM Airlines jet crashes on landing at Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo, in Brazil's worst-ever air disaster. A total of 199 people are killed - all 186 on board and 13 on the ground.

 

5 May: A Kenya Airways' Boeing 737-800 crashes in swampland in southern Cameroon, killing all 114 on board. The official inquiry is yet to report on the cause of the disaster.

 

7 March: A Boeing 737-400 belonging to Garuda Indonesia bursts into flames after landing at Yogyakarta on the island of Java. A total of 22 people are confirmed dead but there are 118 survivors.

 

1 January: An Adam Air Boeing 737-400 carrying 102 passengers and crew comes down in mountains on Sulawesi Island on a domestic Indonesian flight. All on board are presumed dead.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/2008892.stm

 

 

[Andrew Ong 1]

Boeing's statement on the crash:

 

Boeing Statement on One-Two-GO Airways Accident

 

Seattle, Sept. 16, 2007 -- Boeing offers heartfelt sympathy to the families and friends of those lost, and to those passengers who were injured in the September 16 One-Two-GO Airways landing accident in Phuket, Thailand.

 

Boeing is sending an investigator as part of the U.S. team that will provide technical assistance onsite to the Thai authorities in determining the cause of this tragedy.

[LeeTZ 1]

My condolences to the families

[Tamizi Hj Tamby 1]

Yesterday's New Straits Times headline: One-Two-GONE

[Gavin Andrew David 6]

Yesterday's New Straits Times headline: One-Two-GONE

 

Shocking !

 

Windshear perhaps caused the crash..

Just at the crucial moment ...

Wonder how come pilot decided to proceed @ DH

[Fitri Shukri 0]

Condolences to the families of those perished. To the rest, hope they have a speedy recovery

 

Yesterday's New Straits Times headline: One-Two-GONE

 

STUPID NST!!!

Reading NST everytime make me wanna puke!

Edited September 18, 2007 by Fitri Shukri

[Rozhan 0]

NST's choice of words, in my opinion, was improper.

[Radzi 2]

Weather is most likely the major factor. Most likely it is not the only factor.

 

Just to note, the mimima for runway 27 ILS in HKT is 540 ft with threshold elevation of 82 ft. This is slightly higher than normal Cat 1 minima of around 200 ft AGL. Therefore a go-around conducted at minima will have enough clearance from the terrain.

 

[Wai Hung 0]

im still wondering, what can cause the aircraft to bank right just before the crash?

a question to pilots here, can windshear cause the aircraft to steer?

[Pieter C. 5]

a question to pilots here, can windshear cause the aircraft to steer?

 

Yes it can, when flying at minimum speed without a buffer, a windshear can cause a stall causing the plane to 'drop' a wing, making it 'steer'...right captain Radzi ?

[Juanda I. 0]

Just to note, the mimima for runway 27 ILS in HKT is 540 ft with threshold elevation of 82 ft. This is slightly higher than normal Cat 1 minima of around 200 ft AGL. Therefore a go-around conducted at minima will have enough clearance from the terrain.

 

The high minima is probably due to the high ground north of the 27 threshold where the tower is. I'm wondering whether the pilot lost visibility after reaching DH? That is, he was visual at DH and decided to continue with the approach, but then lost visibility due to a passing rain shower and thus elected to go around? A go-around at zero visibility that near to the ground is always fraught with danger.

 

I recall the Qantas QF 1 incident at BKK had similar circumstances where the co-pilot was visual at DH but lost visibility in the landing roll and decided to go around (only to be over ruled by the captain who aborted the GA).

 

[Juanda I. 0]

Check out this amazing video taken just after the crash. (video appears after the advertisement). It's interesting to note how much visibility there is at the time as well.

[Romizi 0]

And more sad when no fire engine and airport people around..

They need help....!!!! Oh my god..!!!

I cannot imagine if there any old women and children on board... So sad.. !!

Edited September 20, 2007 by Romizi

[Seth K 3]

That guy can't beleive anything...............The fire is not that big either, immediate response failed!

[Pieter C. 5]

The fire is not that big either, immediate response failed!

 

Agree there, the fire doesn't look too fierce...probably filmed by a Finnish passenger ?

Does anyone know how long it took before the 'bomba' reached the stricken aircraft ?...

 

 

 

 

[Naim 6]

http://www.bangkokpost.com/

 

Phuket crash analysis 'could take 3 years'

 

It will take at least six months and perhaps three years to fully analyse data from the "black box" flight recorders taken from the plane that crashed at Phuket Airport last month, claiming 90 lives, a senior official said Monday.

 

Aviation Department Director General Chaisak Angkasuwan said data decoded from the black boxes, sent to the US more than two weeks ago, had already reached Thailand but an analysis of the data will need at least six months to three years, depending on its complexity, reported the state-run Thai News Agency (TNA).

 

Thai budget airline One-Two-Go flight OG269 crashed while attempting to land at Phuket Airport in a heavy rainstorm on September 16.

 

Altogether 89 people died immediately in the McDonnell-Douglas MD 82 crash, with the 90th victim dying recently from severe burns in hospital.

 

At least two foreign passengers have brought legal suits against Boeing Company, the owner of McDonnell Douglas.

 

Chaisak said that Boeing Co would be involved by analysing the data pertaining to the aircraft's operation system, a process that could take at least two months.

 

The One-Two-Go aircraft broke into two sections before bursting into flames in both wings and the body of the plane, after it smashed into an embankment after skidding off the runway. (dpa)

 

02:56 Oct 01, 2007

 

[Naim 6]

Still no report, after 2 years?

 

===

 

BBC

Thai crash families' jet ban plea

 

The parents of two Welsh students who died in a plane crash in Thailand are urging travellers to avoid airlines on a European Union aviation blacklist.

 

They want to highlight the issue on the second anniversary of the Phuket crash.

 

Alex Collins, of Maesteg near Bridgend and his girlfriend Bethan Jones, from Porth, Rhondda, both 22, were among 90 passengers and crew who died.

 

The airline One-Two-Go was subsequently added to the list and only removed when grounded by the Thai authorities.

 

An initial Thai civil aviation report into the crash blamed pilot error and fatigue.

 

The One-Two-Go jet crashed trying to land in bad weather.

 

In April, the airline was added to the European Commission's blacklist of operators which are banned from the EU because of safety concerns.

 

It was removed in July because the commission said its certificate had been revoked by the Thai aviation authorities.

 

“ Very few people are aware of this EU Blacklist and we want to raise awareness of its importance, and the fact that it has and will save lives ”

Family statement

 

The pair were a few days into a round-the-world trip to celebrate their graduation.

 

They met while they were studying at Cardiff University and had been saving for and planning the trip for more than a year.

 

Their parents, Jean and Steve Jones of Porth and Margaret and Richard Collins of Maesteg said in a statement: "No parent should ever have to go through the nightmare of losing a child in such a devastating way.

 

"We firmly believe this accident was preventable.

 

"The European Commission absolutely did the right thing in naming and shaming One-Two-Go Airlines."

 

They said at this time of year many families would have their student children travelling abroad, with Thailand a popular destination.

 

"Our message to those families is very clear: at all costs do not fly on any airline that has been on the EU Blacklist, or is associated with an airline that has been named or shamed.

 

"Very few people are aware of this EU Blacklist and we want to raise awareness of its importance, and the fact that it has and will save lives."

 

According to their laywer, lawsuits against the airline and its directors which were started in the US courts have been resolved.

 

But James Healy-Pratt of Stewarts Law said they were frustrated that the Thai aviation authorities had yet to produce its final report into the crash.

 

He said without this inquests into their deaths could not be completed and the delay was causing further distress to their families.

 

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/wales/south_east/8257326.stm

 

Published: 2009/09/16 05:59:55 GMT