09/07/2008
TACA admits human error
TACA admitted that the accident of one of its aircraft, which crashed last May 30 at Toncontín International Airport in the capital of this country, was due to an error of the pilot of the ship, Cesare D'Antonio, confirmed an AP agency report.
"The pilots are human beings like us ... and comments between them occurred in the cabin of an aircraft in a natural way," TACA general manager told the local radio HRN of TAC in Honduras, Armando Fúnez. "The investigation of the case is advanced at 70%." He recognized as true a report published by local newspapers on the content of the "black box" of the fateful TACA flight 390, which highlights the conversation between D'Antonio and Toncontin control tower.
"That's part of the investigation (the accident), but there will be a report at the end," he added.
Shortly before the crash, D'Antonio, who died that day, tried to communicate with the control tower of El Salvador to ask permission to deviate to San Pedro Sula, about 180 kilometres north of Tegucigalpa, or return to their country.
"We have tail wind. The clouds are very low," the pilot was heard in the recording. His last readable word is "pu ....".
In the chat, air traffic controllers told the pilot that there was a visibility of only two kilometres, when required is five in the air terminal, and that the runway was wet and cloudy skies over the capital. For these reasons, he was urged to land in the north end of Toncontín. The pilot, however, requested otherwise and, to his insistence, the tower authorized him to land in the south of the runway.
With 124 passengers and six crew members, the Airbus A320 overran the runway, collapsed trees in its path, broke a fence of steel wire, slipped by a 20 meter hollow north of Toncontín and remained in the hillside . It was removed 12 days later.
Dialogue is disclosed in Honduras since Thursday evening on television and local newspapers, which did not explain how it was obtained.
"The black boxes of the airplane are already in our possession," said on Thursday in a press conference the director general of Civil Aviation, Guillermo Seamann. It was recovered the day after the accident to determine the causes of it, which killed five people and left 65 injured.
According to the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, "the results of the information obtained from the data and voice recorders of TACA flight 390 were handed over to the Civil Aeronautics Board by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB, por sus siglas in English) ".
Honduras sent in early June the black box to Washington so that the NTSB would review. The investigation of the accident is headed by the Civil Aviation Authority of El Salvador, by delegation from Honduras, and could last more than a year. Experts participating in the case are from the four countries involved: Honduras, where the accident occurred; El Salvador which is the headquarters of TACA; France, where the plane was manufactured, and the United States because the two turbines were manufactured there.
"We believe that at this time, while the investigation has not been completed, it is unwise to comment on the data (black box) or make them available to the public, because they are part of an extensive investigation and, hence, are inconclusive," said the U.S. embassy in a statement.
It also noted that at the request of France, investigators will meet in the third week of July at the premises of the NTSB in Washington "to analyse the data compilation to date and coordinate the next steps forward".