Regulus
Its always sad when lives are lost. In aviation all of us become familiar with loss of dear friends. And though grief does cloud reason at times but we do need to take a pragmatic approach and try and learn what happened so that we may be able to use this knowledge to make it safer for all of us.
I currently operate out of goma and I completely agree that a proper handing over/briefing of new crew in the area can not be over stressed.
Since I am here I did get to know certain facts about the crash of caravan UN43W, There was a lot of turbulence that day in the vicinity of the Rwenzories , where the crash took place. and the peaks are almost always covered in clouds. Most aircraft in the area fly anything between 9500 to 12500. And almost every one follows a routing to avoid the Rwenzori mountain range and follow shores of lake edward till you come north of lake to take a route where you can avoid high ground. There is a flight following system in place which monitors ops normal calls and logs the GPS position of all UN aeroplanes every 20 minutes. According to Flt following logs the caravan had reportrd altitude as 22000' in last call. Analysis of GPS position reports made by the caravan show that it travelled just 28 miles along the track between the last two calls a time period of appx 30 min! . There is of course the possibility of the GPS co-ordinates being wrongly interpreted or transmitted. And finally the crash site was located at a height of more than 12000'. I did manage to get some pictures of the crash site but I am not able to attach them here . I will put them on my web page soon.
Last edited by Regulus; 19th May 2006 at 17:33.