Swiss Open Probe Into Collision as Relatives Mourn at Crash Site

As relatives of victims in a deadly collision between a chartered Russian airliner and a DHL cargo jet arrived here to honor the dead, Swiss prosecutors announced Thursday that they have launched a criminal investigation into the accident.

German prosecutors had earlier begun a probe into the Monday night tragedy, which killed 71 people, including 45 children from Russia. A key issue is whether negligence by Swiss air traffic controllers may have been responsible for the crash.

The probe will investigate the chain of events and clarify whether Swiss air traffic controllers “made errors for which they could be held criminally liable,” said Christoph Naef, a Swiss prosecutor.

Swiss controllers gave the Russian Tupolev-154 even less warning time of the impending collision than previously claimed--just 44 seconds, Peter Schlegel, head of Germany’s federal air accident investigation office, said Thursday. “Descending of one of the planes should have started at least 90 seconds before the crossing point,” he said, so the first order to descend came with less than half the time required for safety.

Relatives of the Russian victims attended a memorial ceremony Thursday in Ueberlingen, a lakeside resort town in southwestern Germany near the crash site. They then visited a field where they saw the charred tail of the Russian plane. Grieving amid the wreckage, they laid wreaths and flowers. Some plucked stalks of grain or scooped up handfuls of earth to have something in memory of the site.

The children were mainly from the political elite of the Bashkir republic, an oil-rich, predominantly Muslim region of Russia, and were headed for a beach vacation in Spain. Rescue workers had found the bodies of 68 victims, including the two on board the DHL Airways Boeing 757 jet, police said.

Thomas Schaeuble, a local official, told a news conference that the bodies were so badly damaged, psychologists had advised against allowing parents to see them.

Swiss air traffic control Tuesday was forced to revise its version of how much warning the Russian pilot had that he was on a collision course. It initially said that the Bashkirian Airlines jet had been given nearly two minutes’ notice and that the pilot did not begin descending to avoid the cargo jet until after receiving a third request. The Swiss revised their account after the German investigative agency estimated the time at 50 seconds.

The Russian plane started to descend 30 seconds before the collision, after a second order was issued, Schlegel said. He also said Thursday that 14 seconds before the crash, flight control received the message “TCAS descend,” but that “it is not clear from which plane this message came.”

The phrase refers to the modern collision-avoidance system, called TCAS, that both planes had on board. The devices normally should have been able to communicate with each other, but it is unclear whether both were turned on. Investigators believe that the message was probably from the cargo jet, Schlegel said.

The planes collided while both were descending sharply in an effort to avoid each other. The cargo plane’s descent apparently was in response to the on-board collision-avoidance system.

At the time of the collision, a single flight operator was handling five airplanes on two screens at Zurich airport in Switzerland, including the two that collided. This is not an unusual burden, Schlegel said. Swiss traffic control was in charge of the flights because the planes were in the approach area to the Zurich airport.

Alex Thiel, head of the German air accident investigation agency’s lab in Braunschweig, where flight recorders from both planes were taken, said Thursday that specialists hadn’t yet retrieved information from them. The recorders were badly damaged, which would cause some delay, he said.

The Russian plane was headed from Moscow to Barcelona, Spain, and the cargo plane was en route to Brussels from Bahrain, after a stopover in Bergamo, Italy.

German Transport Minister Kurt Bodewig said Thursday that a Europe-wide system of air traffic control must be established to replace the current fragmented system based on individual countries.

“The Balkanization must be replaced by a common system,” he said. “We need a single European airspace. Air transport is international, and so we must deal with it on a large scale.”

Germany is a strong backer of European Union plans to introduce common surveillance of European airspace by 2004, but critics of the proposal argue that it could cause job losses and safety risks.

Supporters say the plan would bring greater safety by consolidating control at a smaller number of centers, requiring less-frequent transfers of responsibility from one set of controllers to another. German air traffic control turned over the flight paths of the Russian jet and the cargo plane to Swiss controllers shortly before the accident.

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Christian Retzlaff of The Times’ Berlin Bureau contributed to this report.