Pilots Are Cited in Dominican Crash
The Turkish pilots of a chartered airliner that crashed Feb. 6 off the Dominican Republic, killing 189 people, failed to recognize that contradictory cockpit alerts indicated a faulty airspeed indicator, the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday.
The captain could have corrected the problem by switching to a backup airspeed indicator, the board said in a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Birgenair Boeing 757 reached more than 7,300 feet after taking off from the resort city of Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, then plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast. Most of the passengers were German tourists.
The board recommended that the FAA require that all crews be trained to recognize when an airspeed indicator is not working properly and that Boeing be required to develop a more direct warning system to alert pilots.
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