Automatons and Automations: Computers Continue to Perplex Pilots

Air Safety Week, Jan 24, 2005

Swiss airworthiness inspectors work in conjunction with the Joint Aviation Authorities' (JAA) Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft (SAFA) and both France and Italy were apparently notified about the FOCA reservations regarding Flash. France initially denied this, and the Italians questioned that they'd been told. It then came to light that Flash had passed subsequent French tests in the fall of 2003. Flash airlines also had its operating license revoked in Poland in 2002 but, following some maintenance, it was reinstated in 2003. The ill-fated aircraft had had seven different registrations since delivery by Boeing [BA] in 1993. Eventually the European Aviation Authorities got its act together and evolved a harmonized information-sharing protocol for highlighting marginal operators. All of these disclosures were beginning to focus the inquiry upon possible technical failure related to poor maintenance.

An Italian news agency reported the aircraft had operated four sectors on Friday Jan. 2 from Sharm to Turin and Sharm to Venice. On arrival back at Sharm it only spent a short time on the ground before departing for Cairo and Charles de Gaulle (CDG). Six of those killed were a slip crew. Obviously maximum airframe utilization was the name of the Flash game.

The takeoff was from RWY 22R. The last mode C transponder height reading seems to have been 4800 feet. No distress call was made. Sharm radar recorded that the climb to 4800 feet occurred without problem, followed by an abrupt, near 180 degree turn and a dive descent from nearly 5400 feet, with the end of the recording (and presumably the crash) 17 seconds later (that's a mean vertical speed of 17,000 ft/min and an impact velocity of about double that; about 336 knots straight down).

Spatial Disorientation Suspected

The aircraft should have been flying faster than crossover speed in the takeoff regime so the ailerons would have been easily able to overpower a fully hard-over rudder. With the climb over a black sea, and instant transition into a terminal velocity dive, it was beginning to look like spatial disorientation (SD) and recalled the fate of the GulfAir A320 at Bahrain. But that A320 had been turning, accelerating and leveling at a much lower level over the inky blackness of the Gulf. What could have induced loss-of-control in this 737's wings-level climb on a smooth night? Could crew fatigue have been a factor? An Italian newspaper reported this "heavy" (augmented) crew had flown (Egypt)/HESH/Turin/HESH/Venice/HESH before this final leg to Cairo. The max duty-time for a "heavy" crew, for a day departure would be around 16 hours; a single crew 13 hours. By Jan. 8, 2004, the attached 37.5khz acoustic pinger had localized the flight data recorder (FDR) at 1030m and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) 1500m away at 400m. They were later recovered by the deep submergence vehicle Scorpio 2000. Suicidal actions by the pilot were ruled out and the process of scenario elimination tracked inexorably towards what would still be a dumb-founding revelation.