Investigators analyzing the crash last month of a China Airlines
flight said Tuesday that the flight data and cockpit voice
recorders, together with autopsies on the victims and an
examination of the wreckage, showed no evidence of an explosion or
pilot error.
The findings indicate that something probably went wrong inside the
aircraft, a Boeing 747-200, said Kay Yong, the managing director of
the Aviation Safety Council, the agency here that is conducting the
investigation.
Investigators are paying special attention to whether structural
failure or engine problems might have caused the plane to break
into four pieces in mid-flight. The crash of the Hong Kong-bound
flight into the Taiwan Strait on May 25 killed all 225 people
aboard.
Searchers have recovered 162 bodies and 15 percent of the wreckage,
including part of the cockpit, and have found no signs of burns or
of any explosives or gunshots, Mr. Yong said.
But China Airlines, which is struggling to preserve its commercial
viability after nine fatal crashes since 1970, said that it was too
soon to rule out "external forces," as opposed to mechanical
failure, as a cause of the crash.
Roger Ham, a company spokesman, said that only a small part of Pan
Am Flight 103, which was destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie,
Scotland, had been burned. "You have to recover all the wreckage to
see what part is attacked or exploded," he said, while declining to
comment on what China Airlines thinks caused the crash.
There was also early speculation that the aircraft's fuel tank
might have exploded. A fuel tank explosion was implicated in the
crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, a Boeing 747-131, into
the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island shortly after takeoff on July
17, 1996. But Mr. Yong said today that there was no evidence this
happened to the China Airlines flight.
On
Monday the airline offered to pay $372,000 to each of the families
of the people who died. But the offer, made by airline officials to
a gathering of more than 300 relatives of crash victims, drew a
rancorous reception from some, who said the company should pay
$588,000 per victim, or twice what it paid after a fatal crash in
1998, and called for punitive damages.
Some families of crash victims have accused to airline, and to a
lesser extent Boeing, of ducking responsibility for the crash. Lee
Ham, a crash victim's son, said that China Airlines was to blame
for having kept a 23-year-old plane in service too long. The
aircraft crashed on its last flight before it was to be sold to a
small carrier in Thailand.
Boeing declined to comment on today's statements by investigators.
But Ivy Takahashi, a company spokeswoman, said that the plane that
crashed had been on 21,398 flights, below the average of 23,000
flights for all Boeing 747-200s in service.
The breakup of China Airlines Flight 611 has drawn international
attention because it comes at a time of increasing concern over how
long older jets can remain airworthy. Some research has suggested
that metal fatigue may be a particular problem in planes that are
used regularly in very warm, humid places like Taipei and Hong
Kong. But Boeing maintains that with proper maintenance, aircraft
aging should not be a problem.
The flight data recorder from Flight 611 shows that the plane began
gaining altitude at a significantly faster rate in the 27 seconds
before the plane broke apart, although the extra gain in altitude
was well within the plane's design limits, Mr. Yong said at a news
conference here today. The plane was supposed to be leveling off
then as it approached its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet.
No
one in the three-member flight crew said anything to indicate an
awareness of the extra lift, Mr. Yong said. The autopilot had been
engaged earlier in the flight, and there is no evidence that it was
turned off before the plane came apart, he added.
Shortly before the breakup, one of the aircraft's four engines
began providing slightly less thrust. By coincidence, the same
engine is the only one that has been recovered so far from the sea
floor.
Phil Tai, the investigator overseeing the recovery of wreckage,
said that the engine was intact except for a tiny piece that was
missing from the nose cone. Many parts of the engine had been split
along the side, apparently when they hit the water after falling
more than five miles.
On
Sunday, Mr. Yong had separately announced that the cockpit voice
recorder had picked up a dozen faint, mysterious sounds in the 13
minutes before the plane came apart. A computer disk with the
sounds has been sent to the United States for further analysis,
which will take at least a week, Mr. Yong said today.
(China
Daily June 26, 2002)