Reversal of Power Not Cause of Gander Crash, Canada Says

Canadian investigators Thursday dismissed a theory that the crash of a chartered airliner in which 256 Americans died last month was caused by a sudden reversal of engine power just as the DC-8 was taking off from the airport at Gander, Newfoundland.

The idea that the disaster might have resulted from such a reversal became a focus of the investigation after the far right engine was found with a part, the thrust reverser, deployed in a position normally used to brake the plane.

That would have fit in with the sudden slowing of the aircraft and its veering to the right just as it was lifting off the runway early on the morning of Dec. 12, on the last leg of a flight carrying 248 U.S. soldiers and eight crew members from Egypt to Ft. Campbell, Ky.

However, Peter Boag, chief investigator for the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, said the thruster’s position “most probably was the result of impact” when the fully loaded plane fell into a forest one-quarter of a mile from the end of the runway.

Boag said that four weeks of examination had brought “progress in a number of areas,” but he acknowledged that he still has no theory for the cause of the crash and that the investigation “is a long way from completion.”

In fact, when asked if he and his team, which includes investigators from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other American experts, had been able to even focus its search on any probable cause, Boag answered that “at this time I would say no.”

He added that there had been no help from either the flight data recorder, which monitors the performance of the plane in the air, or the cockpit voice recorder, which tapes the conversation among crew members and between the plane and control tower.

“For reasons unknown,” Boag said, the voice recorder did not pick up any of the crew members’ cockpit conversation.

“Very little useful information” is available from the cockpit, he said, because “the voice recorder was not recording from the cockpit area microphone.”

The data recorder also has not been as helpful as hoped, he continued, both because it was a rudimentary device and because it was unable to pick up much useful information in the seconds between takeoff and the crash.

He said regulations require that the cockpit voice recorder be operating, and he noted that three other channels on the recording machine were working at the time of the crash.

But he could not explain why the fourth channel picked up nothing, although he said the problem was not due to the crash.

Nothing from the three operating channels had indicated any problems, Boag added.

Despite these setbacks and Boag’s assertion that almost nothing has been ruled out as a cause, it appears that the investigators have been able to eliminate several areas of concern.

Boag said, for instance, that a close examination of three engines--the two on the left wing and the inside one on the right wing--indicated that “all three were operating normally” with no sign of problems at the time of the crash.

A final check of the fourth engine, the one where the thrust reverser was found, will be completed today, Boag said, but preliminary investigation showed no sign of pre-crash troubles in that part, either.

He also noted that while the wings were destroyed in the fire resulting from the crash, remains of the tail have been recovered and “there is nothing to indicate that the settings (of the rudder and flaps) were out of the ordinary.”

There has been speculation that the flaps, which control the rate of climb and descent, had been set wrong as the plane rolled down the two-mile-long runway, preventing the pilot from reaching sufficient altitude as he passed over the 40-foot-tall trees at the end of the takeoff path.

While investigators would continue examining and re-examining the engines and the shattered bits of the plane’s fuselage, Boag said that his inquiry, based most recently in Ottawa, is returning to Gander in hopes of finding evidence overlooked in the days after the crash.

Besides searching for bits and pieces of the plane, police and safety board workers will resume looking for additional remains of the dead passengers.

Boag said that only 119 of the bodies have been identified, with 111 bodies returned to the next of kin. While he expressed optimism that all of the bodies would be recovered and identified, the investigation chief acknowledged difficulty because of the extent of the plane’s destruction.

Another new area of questioning, Boag said, will be the condition of the crew and the plane at its various loading and refueling stops before the disaster. Investigators will look into loading conditions in Cairo and the activities of the crew, which had come on board in Cologne, West Germany, after a 15-hour layover from an earlier flight.

While he said the possibility of drugs and alcohol contributing to the crash was being looked into, the investigator noted that this line of inquiry is routine in every examination of a plane crash and not necessarily a suspicion of problems.

Furthermore, autopsies on the two pilots and a partial autopsy of the flight engineer showed “nothing to support that there was anything physically wrong with any of the crew members,” Boag said.

Boag played down reports from witnesses that the plane was ablaze before it went down. “There is no firm evidence or reason to believe that the aircraft was on fire before the plane hit the ground,” he said.

The DC-8 was owned by Arrow Air of Miami and chartered by the Defense Department to bring back the 248 U.S. soldiers from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, where they had served for six months on an international peacekeeping force.

The plane had refueled at Gander before en route to Ft. Campbell, where the troops were based as part of the 101st Airborne Division.