Both Engines Thought to Fail in British Crash

Officials said Monday that against “10 million to 1” odds, both engines apparently failed on a British Midland Airways Boeing 737 that crashed Sunday night in central England. The death toll in the crash, Britain’s second in less than three weeks, rose to 44.

Eighty-two passengers and crew members survived, among them pilot Kevin Hunt, who was being hailed as a hero for averting what could have been a much worse disaster by maneuvering the crippled plane away from a village lying in his emergency landing path.

In their first public comment on the crash, several survivors praised emergency ground crews that were on the scene in less than two minutes and doused a potentially disastrous blaze.

Hunt undershot the runway by less than half a mile after losing first the right engine, then the left as Belfast-bound Flight 092 from London neared safety at East Midlands Airport, the nation’s 11th-largest.

The crash occurred while investigators were still cleaning up after the Dec. 21 bombing of a Pan American World Airways jumbo jet over Scotland, killing all 259 on board and 11 residents of the village of Lockerbie in Britain’s worst airline disaster.

Visiting the site of Sunday’s British Midland crash, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to rule out sabotage as the cause.

“We rule out nothing,” she told reporters. “We simply can’t.”

Transport Minister Paul Channon agreed but added that “there is certainly no evidence” of sabotage at this point.

Speculation that foul play might be involved in the crash of Flight 092 was fueled by the extraordinary failure of both engines--an occurrence that William Tench, a former head of the government’s Air Accident Investigation Board, described as so rare that the odds against it are “10 million to 1.”

Police Aboard

There were more than two dozen police and army personnel on board the flight to strife-torn Northern Ireland.

The British news agency Reuters quoted a spokesman for the outlawed Irish Republican Army as denying any responsibility for the crash.

The IRA leads the bloody battle against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Aviation experts cited three possible causes for a double engine failure--contaminated fuel, an oil leak and improper servicing.

The aircraft was one of the newest series built by Boeing, a 737-400, and had been delivered less than 12 weeks ago. Michael Bishop, chairman of British Midland, said that an identical plane, also delivered late last year, had been taken out of service for a detailed inspection.

The CFM-56-3C engines used on the aircraft are made by a joint-venture company--the American General Electric and the French SNECMA and were assembled at a factory near Paris.

In production since 1984, the CFM-56-3C engines are currently being used on more than 500 Boeing 737s worldwide, according to William Shumann, a GE spokesman.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, double engine failures of CFM-56-3 engines have been reported twice previously. Early last year, a Greek Olympic Airways 737-300 flying in heavy rain lost power in both engines, but pilots were able to restart one of them while the plane was still airborne, an agency spokesman said. And last May, a Salvadoran TACA 737-300 made a forced landing in heavy rain in New Orleans after one engine caught fire and the other lost power, an agency spokesman said.

No one was hurt in either incident, but the FAA later put out a directive advising pilots of planes equipped with the CFM-56-3 to take special precautions when flying in “moderate to heavy precipitation,” an FAA spokesman said.

There was no serious precipitation reported on Flight 092’s route Sunday night.

Aviation experts here said that pilot Hunt would have had little trouble landing his plane if only one engine had failed.

Flight 092 left London’s Heathrow airport at 9:52 p.m., 22 minutes behind schedule. The crew had just begun passing out meals eight minutes later when Hunt reported severe vibration in the right-hand engine.

Josephine McRea, a school teacher, said she heard a loud noise, and “suddenly there was rather dramatic sort of movement in the plane.”

Then, according to two other survivors, Hunt announced that the plane had lost its starboard (right side) engine and that they would be making an emergency landing at the East Midlands field in about 10 minutes.

But the plane failed to reach the field. It careened across Britain’s main north-south M-1 highway, the nation’s busiest, and smashed into an embankment on the east side of the road, breaking into three parts.

As the plane was struggling toward the airfield, emergency crews were on the move, and they arrived, according to Transport Minister Channon, within 90 seconds of the crash.

“That must have saved the lives of many people,” Channon said.

Channon told reporters that “all we can say at the moment is that the evidence looks entirely consistent with the right engine having failed before the impact and the left engine being on fire at some stage.”

Channon is expected to give a preliminary report in Parliament today.

Nine representatives of the Transport Ministry’s Air Accident Investigation Bureau were on hand Monday, and officials said both the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder and its flight data recorder had been recovered. Officials hope that data contained in those recorders will help explain why the plane’s engines failed. FAA, GE and Boeing officials flew to Britain on Monday to assist in the investigation.

Residents of the nearby town of Kegworth praised pilot Hunt for avoiding what could have been another Lockerbie, where the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 slammed into a residential neighborhood.

One, Leslie Pendleton, a member of the County Council, said: “My son did see the plane come in over a house on Springfield, which is the road closest to the airport. He said it was coming in nose-down. And as it passed over the houses, the pilot appeared to raise the nose a little. I’m sure that because of that the houses were missed.”

Times Staff Writer Douglas Jehl, in Washington, also contributed to this article.